Now enough about my essays! Let me tell you a little bit about the fiction I love to write, and who in particular I love writing it for. 

One hot summer afternoon when I was 10, my grandfather climbed into his attic and gifted me a box of “men’s adventure novels” that he’d read during his time in the Navy. These beat-up yellowed paperbacks bore names on their covers like Louis L’amour, Jim Thompson, Elmer Leonard, Raymond Chandler, as well as other relatively unknown and obscure cowboy and detective fiction authors from the 1950s and 60s. And in no time at all, I was so hooked on these gritty tales of suspense and romance and heroism, that I was getting caught on a nightly basis by my grandmother reading them with a flashlight beneath the covers!

Over the next several years I would discover that the “men’s adventure novel” tended to follow a specific formula that spanned across a number of genres from Horror to Sci-Fi to Westerns to Spy Thrillers, and that formula was: a boy or man embarks on a quest filled with danger and uncertainty, makes friends along the way, meets a beautiful woman, overcomes adversity, defeats the villain… or fails at one or all of these, but nevertheless fails in a way that’s still valorous.

Today this storyline is derided by most major publishers as “outdated”, and subsequently the fiction market over the last 15 years has seen male readership plummet 40%. For this reason, I think most major publishers are full of crap. I think churning out politically correct morally ambiguous fiction with overwrought prose and meandering plots is a broken business model. If the publishing industry wants to regain 40% of their customer base, then they need to bring back the kinds of stories that regular people—and especially men and boys—used to read and want to read again.

But until they catch on, you have me. Inspired by my grandfather’s box of paperbacks, I self-publish similar stories for a target male audience, but my stories also tend to contain deeper underlying themes: the subtle presence of Divine light in a dark world; the importance of historical memory and ancestors; sincerity over irony; supernatural intrusions in a universe people think is purely natural; and the triumph of good over evil. Most importantly though, I hope my stories encourage boys and men to battle monsters and rescue damsels during a time where so many stories set out to convince them that they are the monsters to the damsels. In a world of Sally Rooneys I strive to be an Ian Fleming, in the hopes that one day you (yes you) will dig a box of my books out of your attic and hand them to your grandson. After all, the best any author can hope for is to be read beneath a blanket by flashlight.

Influences: Prior to 2020, I loved H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, Anthony Bourdain, A.A. Gill, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Since 2020 however, I’ve come to enjoy Yoram Hazony, Douglas Murray, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Ben Shapiro, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Wendell Berry, Harold Bloom, and Roger Scruton, as well as the fiction of Cormac McCarthy and John le Carré, and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Persistent influences throughout my adult life—regardless of shifting political and spiritual views—have been Theodor Herzl, Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, while two philosophers who are not influences but “guilty pleasures” are Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

Places I’ve Been Published: The Federalist, Intellectual Takeout, Outlaw Poetry, Areo Magazine (defunct), Topical Magazine (defunct), Paste Magazine