Darin is the bestselling author of Noise, Chimpanzee, Totem, and Light Both Foreign and Domestic. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory with a concentration in Poetics, which he earned under the direction of theoretical syntactician and linguist Haj Ross. As an academic, he primarily focused on the intersection of contemporary cognitive theory and literary analysis.
Darin has taught courses on writing and literature at the University of North Texas, Furman University, and East Tennessee State University—including specialized topics such as “Apocalypse, Annihilation, and Unrest in Contemporary Media” and “Jules Verne, the Wild West, and Frontier Socialism.” He now conducts workshops and gives presentations independently.
Darin also worked as the principal script writer for id Software, the industry-leading video game studio behind such iconic titles as Quake and Rage. He contributed story development, voice-acting scripts, character creation, and worldbuilding to early versions of id’s re-issue of Doom.
He has worked in various editorial and design capacities for a number of nonprofit and commercial publications, including Farrago’s Wainscot, an ezine showcasing fiction and poetry in the “literary weird” mode. He is a co-founder of Goliad Media, an independent publishing, recording, and art production house based in North Texas. In 2016, he donated his archive to the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University.
Darin’s books have been praised for “dazzling originality” (NPR Books) and for being “exceptionally polished” (Publishers Weekly). His books have twice been named to Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List, and Library Journal listed Chimpanzee among its top indie titles of 2014.
Interviews
- At The Literary Podcast at Pariah Arts.
- At Sunstruck Magazine.
- At The Reading Envy Podcast.
- At Washington Independent Review of Books.
- At 1670 AM, Denton, TX.
- At The Dallas Observer.
- At The Denton Record-Chronicle.
- At We Denton Do It.
- At 1670 AM, Denton, TX.
- At Tor.com.
- At the Diet Soap Podcast (#2).
- By Sam Snoek-Brown.
- At the Diet Soap Podcast (#1).
Selected Publications
- Darkmetal—Underland Press (forthcoming)
- “Under the Lotus“—PsiWars (Hex Publishers)
- “Sweet Water”—Eighteen: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem (Underland Press)
- Light Both Foreign and Domestic—Underland Press
- Totem—Underland Press
- Chimpanzee—Underland Press
- Noise—Del Rey/Spectra
- “How Nothing Happens”—Cyber World: Tales of Humanity’s Tomorrow (Hex Publishers)
- “Syntagm”—Moon Milk Review (reprinted in Great Jones Street)
- “Fairyland”—Coffinmouth (reprinted in Great Jones Street)
- “∞°”—Electric Velocipede (reprinted in The Best of Electric Velocipede)
- “The Dust and the Red”—Apex Magazine (reprinted in The Book of Apex: Volume 3; reprinted in Hex Publishers; reprinted in Great Jones Street)
- “‘Seng, Running”—Postscripts 20/21 (reprinted in GrendelSong; reprinted in Great Jones Street)
- “They Would Only Be Roads”—Paper Cities (audio recording, Far Fetched Fables)
- “All the Blue in the Mirror”—Electric Velocipede
- “Hotels and Other Forms of Collapse”—3:AM Magazine
- “Two”—Hatter Bones
- “Sleepwalker”—Needles & Bones
- “slipstring”—sein und werden
- “The Basement, Borges”—Diet Soap #1
- “The Heresy Box”—Polyphony 6
- “The Self-Weird World: Problems of Being as the Fantastic Invasion in Small-press Speculative Fiction”—The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18.1
- “Remodeling Selfhood: A Review-Essay of Paul J. Thibault’s Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-Other Dynamics as a Complex System”—The Semiotic Review of Books 17.2
- “The Magic Mundane: Re-examining the Supernatural in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon“—The Internet Review of Science Fiction
- “whisper”—elimae
- “Arrow”—Astropoetica
- “Hieratics”—Abyss & Apex #23