The Books Mainstream Publishing Won’t Push Are Finding An Audience Anyway

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

***

Last year 40% of Americans didn’t read a single book. Print book sales are rising, but not necessarily in any return to tradition; a printed book is a useful prop that can be held up to the camera for TikTok. Responding to ever greater challenges, the publishing industry is nevertheless a lot more ideologically homogenous than it used to be, and it doesn’t much care about you or me.

But who’s black-pilling? We still love books, and we’re not giving up. Every day, new authors and publishers are turning out books for varying kinds of right-of-center audiences. It’s hard to stand out in an ocean of content, though, given that conservative outlets notorious for grousing about the culture never review right-wing authors’ contributions to it — until now.

So, here are three thrillers by authors who don’t hate us.

“American Paladin” by Larry Correia

Larry Correia is underreviewed and complains about it, which sounds like egotism until you remember the man has sold so many books that he has literally purchased a mountain. Correia is best known for his flagship series “Monster Hunter: International,” wherein private contractors fight monsters and make money off of government bounties. Like many War on Terror-era thrillers, its hero is well-funded and aided by powerful individuals and organizations. Women fantasize about well-off romantic interests desperately attracted to them; men fantasize about well-paid, cool jobs that buy them guns.

“American Paladin” goes the opposite way. Nick Spears is poor, inexpert, and unlucky. For years, he’s been desperately trying to hunt the supernatural, but it isn’t biting. When he was a teenager, he and his loved ones unknowingly wandered across the veil between worlds. Only Nick survived to make it home. Now the monsters and unholy cultists that are the subject of his desired revenge stubbornly refuse to show up. As consolation, he’s turned vigilante to hunt human predators instead.

When a podcaster’s unwelcome attention threatens to draw attention to his work, Nick finds the podcaster in the crosshairs of the other side he’s hunted all these years. Now the two of them are running and gunning for their lives against the enemy Nick has sought all his life.

Correia is always dependable at delivering action, but the real pleasure here is the setting. “American Paladin” offers a refreshing world of elusive cryptids, mysterious lands, and conspiracy-minded schizos trying to make sense of it all. Its magic and monsters feel genuinely eerie, and its hero stands out by being capable but entirely uncredentialed. Nick Spears has no cool resume; he never finished high school, never went to war, and at one point in the book encounters a gun he is unable to identify immediately. Fans of cryptid lore should get a kick out of this working hero in America’s lonely places. Nick Spears belongs on the weird adventure shelf beside F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack.

“American Apocalypse: The Second American Civil War” by Kurt Schlichter

There are an awful lot of right-wing books about American civil wars and their aftermaths. Most of them are heavy on red meat and bluster, Kurt Schlichter’s own Kelly Turnbull series included. So it’s an unexpected and interesting choice to see Schlichter consciously imitate Studs Terkel and fictional treatments such as Max Brooks’s “World War Z” to recount an American Civil War from a mostly ant’s-eye view, in the form of first-person reminiscences from a variety of participants.

Some of these are more effective than others. Like most right-of-center authors, Schlichter isn’t any more convincing writing leftists than lefty writers are at writing conservatives. A widowed mother trying to survive, a cold-blooded hitman who wanted the war to keep going because he loved doing targeted killings, and unreconstructed leftists in exile all speak with the same voice. Worse, they’re all covering a similar general arc. While Schlichter divides his book into three sections covering different periods of the war, in practice each individual tells their whole story of the war from beginning to end. It gets a little redundant.

Unlike a lot of right-wing civil war fiction, though, “American Apocalypse” is realistic enough to draw a portrait of a brutish war that’s far from the easy victory you frequently see braggadocious right-wingers assume on social media. Spoiler: Team Right wins, but it’s extremely ugly and the result winds up being American Francoism, which also makes the book notable as a yardstick of sentiment of the right-of-center type that doesn’t want American Francoism and wouldn’t advocate for it but might be willing to live under it if they didn’t have to shoulder any moral responsibility for it.

A lot of right-wing authors cover similar subject matter, but none with Kurt Schlichter’s out-of-the-box approach. It doesn’t succeed as well as it might have, but it’s encouraging to see the effort.

“Lost Causes” by Richard Nichols

“Lost Causes” opens simply enough: When a British operator desperately breaks cover to get a warning out, only to be cut down by gunfire mid-call, the bureaucrats put the kibosh on any attempt at a rescue or retrieval. So the operator’s commanding officer turns to MI11, aka the Mill, a secret branch of British intelligence whose job is specifically killing people and breaking their stuff. The catch: MI11 is about to be disbanded, so its operative, code-named John Buchan (in a hat-tip to the author of “The Thirty-Nine Steps”), has only a few days before his support evaporates entirely.

You can figure out mostly how it goes from there because “Lost Causes” is an old-school kind of thriller. And I’m not complaining about that: Nichols, more power to him for it, is clearly writing the kind of thriller he loves to read with elements that publishers aren’t as interested in buying. That’s what indie books are for. Some action scenes are quite good, notably one where the captured hero has to fight his way through a bunch of armed men in a moving car.

Unfortunately, a lot also plays much less well. Interweaved flashbacks are too long and too dull, and the present-day digressions are worse. “Lost Causes” is awash in musings about the importance of rough men, the decadence of modern life, and the selfishness of baby boomers. A little red meat is nice, but Nichols serves it up in such quantities that the lions in the Circus Maximus would say “all right, already.” The lengthy monologue about the perfidiousness of baby boomers is delivered by the bad guy — as justification for his villainy because he’s a baby boomer! Even a reader completely in agreement with the author’s sentiments will find himself hoping Nichols will just get on with it. At its best, “Lost Causes” is just okay. It’s worth a read for aspiring novelists; seeing Nichols’s successes and missteps will help give them a better sense of what works and what doesn’t.

***

David Hines has a background in forensic science and international human rights, has written for the Federalist and the American Conservative, and loves books. Possibly even yours.