Book Talk
The Stories Behind My Books
I’ve been publishing for more than thirty years, under my own name and others, across dark fantasy, psychological thrillers, Southern Gothic, and nonfiction astrology. This is where I talk about the books themselves — why I wrote them, the research and real life that leaked into the plots, and the themes I keep circling back to no matter what genre I think I’m writing. Pull up a chair.
Jump to: The Story Behind the Story · Themes I Keep Circling · Genre & Craft · Writing With & Against AI
Quick Guide
What is Book Talk?
Book Talk is where I write about my own novels and nonfiction — the story behind each book, the research that shaped it, and the themes I return to across genres. It’s the conversation around the books, not the books themselves.
Where can I read your books?
Many are free to read right here on the site in my online Library, chapter by chapter. Others are available direct from me at Curios or from the usual retailers. Each post below links to where you’ll find that particular book.
What genres do you write?
Dark fantasy, literary and psychological thrillers, Southern Gothic, and nonfiction astrology — often braided together. My fiction tends toward damaged characters, hidden libraries, and the pull of memory, fate, and revenge that still leaves room for healing.
Start Here
New here? Start with the newest — my piece on Silo and the cost of erasing a memory, which walks straight into the question at the heart of Sleeping with Demons. From there, browse by whatever pulls you: the real stories behind the plots, the themes I can’t stop writing, the genres my work lives in, and how I do (and don’t) write alongside AI.
The Story Behind the Story
Where the books actually come from — the stray research, the real places, the manuscripts pulled back out of storage.
- Why I Wrote a Book about the Vertex — I expected curiosity when I first taught the Vertex in public. What I got was recognition — people arriving with their own fated-encounter stories already in hand. This is how that became a whole book.
- Fiction, Fact, and Fallout: The Story Behind a Biological Weapons Plot Point — How a chilling plot point in my 1990s thriller Access came together from bulletin-board research back when the whole web was maybe 500 pages — and why it still unsettles me.
- When Government Conspiracy Research Walks the Line Between Fiction and Fear — The uneasy ground between making it up and finding it out, and what those late-night mid-90s research dives actually turned up.
- How a Green Cemetery Found Its Way into My Novel — A real green-burial homestead worked its way into Rite of Reckoning. I trace how a detail from life becomes a place on the page.
- Resurrecting the Christian Southern Gothic Novel — Stranded from my desk, I pulled a 1993 manuscript out of storage — Waiting on the Thunder — and make the case for a genre that barely has a name.
- Lost City Tropes and Ireland’s Cill Stuifin — A lifelong love of lost-city stories, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to a drowned Irish city, and how the trope keeps surfacing in my fiction.
Themes I Keep Circling
No matter the genre, the same handful of questions keep showing up: memory, fate, revenge, and what it costs to try to fix what already hurt.
- Silo Season 3 and the Cost of Erasing a Memory — Start here. Silo asks whether erasing ten thousand memories counts as mercy. I spent a whole novel — Sleeping with Demons — on the same question, and the answer charged my characters for every rescue.
- The Payback Archives: Where Revenge Meets Healing — My world of quiet vendettas, emotional fallout, and hard-won redemption — with just enough magic to tip the scale. Where the revenge story and the healing story turn out to be the same one.
- How Research Saved Me from the Fate of Ophelia — Forty years of thinking about Hamlet’s Ophelia, a Taylor Swift song I can’t stop singing, and how research became the thing that kept me from drowning in the same water.
- Beyond Fixed Fates: What Turn of Earth Taught Me — Writing Turn of Earth pulled me into Maeve’s questions about fate, time, and the quiet consequences of love — and I came out with a few answers I didn’t start with.
Genre & Craft
The labels and lineages my work sits in — some I chose, some the machines and the readers handed me.
- The Overlap Between FicInt and Dark Academia — Two labels — fictional intelligence and Dark Academia — meet in my work. I map where they overlap and why my books keep landing in both.
- Dark Academia and Me: When the Patterns Start Talking Back — What happens when a body of work gets large enough to reveal things you never consciously planned, and the threads between “unrelated” books start showing.
- When Did My Books Become “Literary Thrillers”? — Running my backlist through AI assessment tools turned up a label I never chose. A wry look at how machines categorize a career built before the category existed.
- Why We Crave Secret Libraries — A love letter to hidden archives, forbidden collections, and the truths we ache to understand — the ache that powers my Secret Lives of Librarians universe.
- Writing for the Fourth Turning — The quiet kind of writing that doesn’t chase the last trend but listens for the emotional need a society hasn’t quite named yet.
Writing With and Against AI
Where the tools help, where they can’t, and where the line between human-made and machine-made actually falls.
- Why AI Couldn’t Write This Astrology Book — I try to write books that only I could write. Here’s why the Vertex book, fifteen years in the making, was never something a machine could have produced.
- Fable 5 Saved My Fables — A late-night session with a new AI model solved a thirty-year-old problem in my fables — and clarified the real line between human and machine-made work.
- Living in a Faraday Cage and Writing Conspiracy Theory Novels — Chicken wire in the walls, conspiracy novels on the desk. The very on-brand house I wanted, and the fiction that goes with it.
Want to actually read the books? Most of my fiction lives, free and chapter by chapter, in my online Library. And if the astrology posts pulled you in, the Vertex & Anti-Vertex hub is where that side of the work lives.
Closing Thoughts
Every book I write turns out to be about the same few things: memory, fate, and the cost of trying to fix what already hurt. I don’t plan it that way. It just shows up, book after book, the way it did the night I watched Silo and heard my own novel talking back to me. If any of this makes you want to open one of the books, they’re a click away — and a lot of them are free.
Want every post about my books and writing? Browse the full Books archive.
Featured Book
Dark fantasy in the Secret Lives of Librarians universe: one night, one eclipse, and every rescue has a price.
Visit the Book Page →
Read it free in my online Library →