About

Darin Bradley is a product of Texas—of its space and mythology. He was born in Arlington, TX in 1979 and stayed there until moving to Lubbock in 1999, where he attended Texas Tech University for one year. His time out west left lasting impacts on his conception of Texas culture—a fascination with dust storms, cracked earth, and expansive territory continues to permeate his writing. Following Lubbock, he moved to Denton, in North Texas, where he would stay to finish his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees—and where he would meet and marry his wife. After spending a few years in North and South Carolina, he and his wife have returned to Denton for good.

Darin spent several years as a collegiate instructor for the University of North Texas, Furman University, and East Tennessee State University. Primarily, he taught courses on writing and literature, occasionally offering specialized courses such as “Apocalypse, Annihilation, and Unrest in Contemporary Media,” “Jules Verne, the Wild West, and Frontier Socialism,” or “Reading and Writing about Cognitive Theory.” His doctoral dissertation, The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, addressed the processes and understanding of selfhood in experimental literature with special concentrations on the principles of simulacra, recursion, and anachrony—these ideas were strong influences on the creation of Farrago’s Wainscot, the online journal where he served as co-founder, editor-in-chief, and fiction editor during the project’s three-year run. During its time, Farrago’s Wainscot garnered a number of critical nods in various Year’s Best anthologies while earning a reputation as a leading online venue of the “literary weird.”

Bradley’s first novel, Noise, relates ideas about social theory and personal mythology that he finalized after leaving Denton, the city that inspired Slade. Widely regarded as a direct “apocalypse” novel, Noise also attempts to explore the plasticity of selfhood and how it remakes trauma in meaningful ways. An exploration of identity, understanding, faith, and personal mythology, the novel metaphorizes collapse as a means of illustrating existential, nihilistic, or ontological problems of understanding one’s “self”—against the architecture of a subversive world rewriting the rules of the civilized society that generated the story’s leading characters. Since Bradley wrote Noise while living in South Carolina, he also intended the novel as a lament for the city he loved.

Currently, he is the full-time writer at id software.

Selected Bibliography