Human beings are complicated creatures. Our stories are rarely neat. So how should I summarize mine? I’m a novelist, essayist, Army Infantry veteran, former defense contractor, and native Texan. I’ve traveled all over the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and Middle East, mostly in a professional capacity taking part in security, extraction, and intelligence missions.
Ethnically Jewish but raised Christian, in my twenties I became an atheist and was an active writer among the “anti-woke left” between 2014-2019. Yet after the 2020 pandemic, living in Israel from 2018-2021, taking psychedelics in 2022, and reading a lot of classical Western literature in 2023, I underwent a radical worldview shift in my thirties that resulted in a recovery of my belief in G-d, conversion to Judaism (Mazorti), and embrace of a “countercultural cultural conservatism” that fuses economic populism with traditional social values.
You can still find essays from my previous life on here under my old blog Young Heathen. But I do hope you’ll find my recent articles on Cowboy Mystic to be more engaging, enraging, and enchanting.
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, and 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 (regardless of genre), 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, and defeats the villain… or fails at defeating the villain, but fails in a way that’s still valorous.
Today this storyline is derided by major publishers as “outdated” and “problematic”, and subsequently the fiction market over the last 15 years has not only seen male readership decline by 40%, but has seen newly released titles typically sell less than 200 copies. Yet despite major publishers only managing to stay in business due to back catalogue purchases of exactly the kinds of stories they hate, these companies stubbornly refuse to resume publishing novels that regular people—and especially men and boys—used to read and want to read again. Instead, they prefer hemorrhaging money and customers by churning out either politically correct morally ambiguous stories with overwrought prose and meandering plots or smutty “fantasy” and “suspense” stories that are basically just porn-in-print.
Well I’m tired of this. And maybe you are too. Inspired by my grandfather’s box of paperbacks, I self-publish novels primarily for a target audience of young men (though all readers—men and women, young and old—are deeply appreciated). These stories of mine, while retaining the “pulp” quality of decades past, contain deeper underlying themes as well: the subtle presence of divine light in dark times, the magic of true love, the importance of historical memory and ancestors, sincerity over irony, 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 when so many modern stories set out to convince men and boys they are the monsters to the damsels. In a world of Sally Rooneys I strive to be an Ian Fleming, so 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 Joshua 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
What I Love Besides Writing: smoking cigars, riding horses, shooting guns, reading Tanakh, going camping, exploring National Parks, worshipping at synagogue, talking to older veterans, watching football (NCAA: Texas Longhorns/NFL: Buffalo Bills), sitting by big fireplaces, listening to ZZ Top or Paul Cauthen, eating kosher barbecue, drinking Dr. Pepper (sweet nectar of the good Lord), touring gothic cathedrals and castles, spending too much money on boots, and falling asleep to true crime or paranormal podcasts.