About the Author
Hemingway's advice to writers was to "write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." That's where all my novels start, with truth. And then I follow that truth wherever it may lead.
Sometimes that's a teenage scavenger hunted across the stars, forced to negotiate with traumatized alien intelligences instead of being enslaved by them. Sometimes it's a young woman disguised as a boy, on the run for murder, using her wits to crack historically-accurate ciphers and stop a regicide. Sometimes it's a soldier making command decisions where one mistake costs lives—and living with those consequences long after the battle ends. Sometimes it's a woman who never wanted to be anyone's messiah, burning down a 3,000-year empire from the inside.
The settings change—military fantasy, space opera, historical spy thriller, YA adventure—but the pressure stays constant. My protagonists think their way through impossible situations, make hard choices with permanent consequences, and survive by intelligence as much as strength.
Readers have compared my work to Joe Abercrombie, Richard Morgan, and Glen Cook for the unflinching violence and moral complexity—but with the cultural worldbuilding and political sophistication of writers like Arkady Martine and Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm after that intersection: genre fiction that takes ideas seriously without pulling punches on what conflict actually costs.
I write in the tradition of Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy—adventure fiction that treats serious philosophical questions with uncompromising honesty, that respects reader intelligence, that refuses to simplify moral complexity.
People die. Not as noble sacrifices that advance the plot—they just die, like people do. Victories cost something permanent. PTSD doesn't reset between chapters. The moral complexity is baked into the story, not delivered as lecture. You'll get the genre experience you came for: the firefights, the starship battles, the conspiracies, the magic.
But I trust you to find the answers.
Because my books are Rorschach tests with teeth. How you respond to the impossible choices my characters face reveals what you actually believe about power, violence, and the limits of utilitarian ethics.
I recognize that might make some readers uncomfortable. And that's good. Discomfort is the point. Comfort is complacency, and the world can't afford that.
I see articles bemoaning men not reading recent literary works exploring what it means to be a man. My bet is more men would read if those literary works were as good as Born in Battle instead of being bloodless academic musings that are homework with a thin veneer of story.
— 5-Star Goodreads Review
You can see what happens when I push that approach through three books spanning nearly half a million words in Born in Battle—the final chapter of my #1 bestselling Military Fantasy and War Fiction trilogy Doomsday Recon. It follows a soldier's arc from green optimism into the kind of darkness that can eat you from the inside out like a cancer.
Readers have called it "a literary work in a military fiction trench coat with a fantasy fedora and sci-fi time-traveling accessories," "likely one of the most terrifying horror stories I have read since I stumbled across H.P. Lovecraft," and praised it for its authenticity: "What makes [it] work so well is the author's grasp of small unit cohesion in a modern military… This book does it better than any other I've read."
Long after reading they're still lying awake at night thinking about duty, sacrifice, and what it costs to keep going.
Ryan is an exceptionally talented writer—absolutely on the shortlist of the best writers I've worked with in my fifteen-year career. Every interaction is a pleasure.
— David Gatewood, Editor-in-Chief, WarGate Books
I’m the creator and author of the Doomsday Recon trilogy, co-credited with Jason Anspach—a #1 bestseller in military fantasy and war fiction praised for its immersive and authoritative world-building, military authenticity, and unflinching portrayal of combat. Other works include the Zarahemla Two Crows weird west series, the novella Junk Rat, and forthcoming novels Doors to the Stars (Lost Frontier Press, September 2026), and the Dark Dominion duology and The Stygian Blades (currently seeking representation).
I’m also a freelance creative director, former cavalry scout, and was a software engineer for half a lifetime before turning to writing full time.
Born in Canada, I moved to the Seattle area in my teens, where I still live with my wife in a half-empty nest with arguably too many dogs.
What You Can Read Now
Doomsday Recon: When a freak rainstorm transports Army Cav Scout Nephi Bennett and his platoon from 1989 Panama to a brutal fantasy world ruled by an Aztec god, survival becomes their only mission. In the Land of the Black Sun, fuel runs low and ammunition dwindles as they face savage beasts, witches, and tribes demanding human sacrifice. This #1 bestselling military fantasy trilogy follows a soldier's arc from optimism into darkness that doesn't reset between chapters—a tale of duty, sacrifice, and the cost of keeping your humanity when an ancient evil rewards your worst impulses.
The Widow's Son: Keep the Good Book close and your six-gun closer. Utah, 1867: When demons abduct a widow's infant son—a child born of supernatural forces—Federal Agent Zarahemla Two Crows faces a malevolent enemy from his past. The young pioneer mother insists on joining the reluctant lawman, and together they're thrust into a continent-spanning apocalypse. Aided by a vampire-slaying nun and a steam-mech pilot, these unlikely heroes battle through a haunted American West filled with skin-walkers, zombies, and ancient evils. Their quest leads them through the gates of Hell itself to prevent the resurrection of a godlike entity of darkness—where faith and six-guns are their only salvation in a world where the West got weird.
A Fistful of Demons: Headlined by veteran storyteller David J. West, this massive anthology assembles over twenty of the freshest voices in the Weird West genre into 600+ pages of supernatural gunslinging action. Inspired by The Widow's Son, these tales weave North American mythology, magic, alternate histories, and steampunk into the grit of the Old West. From undead plagues and demon hunters to ancient evils and unholy relics, each story delivers the genre-bending thrills of classics like Deadlands and The Dark Tower. This tome is bursting at the seams with weird western adventure, including The Spear of Destiny, the sequel novella to The Widow's Son.
Coming Soon
Doors to the Stars: A YA Science Fiction novel about a dying sixteen-year-old scavenger named Wulan who discovers an ancient alien artifact in the ruins of a dead world. The Forger disk calls to her in her mother's lullaby, offering her the power to reactivate the gates connecting thousands of worlds—but at a terrible cost. Rescued by a smuggler crew who becomes her found family, Wulan must navigate deadly space and negotiate with traumatized alien intelligences while evading the tyrannical Ascendancy. As the disk changes her, she faces an impossible choice: sacrifice her humanity to save the galaxy, or stay herself and watch it burn. Available September, 2026.
The Dark Dominion Sequence is an upmarket space opera about an impossible pregnancy that exposes the genetic lies holding together a theocratic empire. The foundational duology—Immortal and Godsbane—is for readers of Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory and R.F. Kuang’s Babel—stories where the institution that made the protagonist is the enemy she has to unmake. Currently seeking representation.
The Stygian Blades is a dark and bawdy late-Tudor secondary-world fantasy about a motley band of rogues, mages, trulls—and a sticky-fingered actress—in a race to stop a regicide in order to save their own skins (they couldn’t give a clipped farthing about the queen). For fans of historically-adjacent fiction where the conspiracy plot serves as a frame for the messy, profane lives of the people surviving inside it through wit and gallows humor. Currently seeking representation.