The Book I Couldn’t Write Until I stopped Trying to Kill Myself

From Lewd Beginnings

To Make the World Obey started from an internet rumor that pornstar Liz Vicious was dead and found in a dumpster.

I took off with the idea. My initial story was about a young woman who discovered the power her sexualized body gave her. She developed what she thought was a media empire off of her porn, with her boyfriend beside her. She cut him out, though, because she got too many complaints about his body and his performance. By the end of the book, he was going to kill her.

It was about power, corruption, and decay.

That was 2017. I was dating the woman who would become my wife. I had the concept. I had the anger. I had the worldview that would fuel this kind of darkness.

So I started writing.

The Man Who Wanted to Cut Himself Out

In 2017, I was spiritually empty. I called myself "Buddish"—not quite Buddhist, just performing the aesthetics of meditation and generic prayer. I wore a mala around my wrist and said wishes on it. My nights consisted of documentaries, book research, and YouTube infotainment, because I thought consuming enough knowledge would be enough to make me better. It wasn't transformation. It was spiritual window shopping.

I drank a lot of cheap gin and went through a ton of PBR cases. I did a lot of drugs. I lost about 60 pounds by working out two to three times a day, punishing my body into submission because if I could just control this one thing, maybe I could feel less powerless about everything else.

I read Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future around this time. I learned about Japanese Grass Eaters and MGTOW. I discovered Jack Donovan, and my dreams consisted of living in a compound in the Nevada desert with ten dogs. Sometimes I felt like the world would be better burnt to cinders so we could start over. Uncle Ted was right. Tyler Durden preached truth. When the structure is rotten, you’ve got to tear this cabin down.

Rage and disappointment burned my gut like ulcers.

Then, in 2018, I was diagnosed with epilepsy.

It resulted from a head wound I'd received as a baby—before I could even form memories; before I had any agency at all. It shaped my entire neurological reality, and I had zero say in it.

I couldn't reconcile that. I couldn't accept that something so serious, so life-altering, could happen completely beyond my control. The rage metastasized. It wasn't just about my failures anymore—existence itself was a tyrant, cruel and bored, and I just happened to be within reach.

That's why I gave Temujin epilepsy in the book. It seemed like a convenient plot point at the time, but I know now what I was really doing: I was giving my rage and loss of agency to a character who could express it through violence. What better form of agency, I thought, than coercion? When reason fails, a baseball bat does nicely. So I created a monster who could embody my fury against circumstances beyond my control.

But here's what I couldn't admit to myself: I wasn't trying to make the world obey; I was trying to kill the parts of myself I hated most.

I'm my family's fuckup. I'm the one who, before meeting my wife, almost married a loser. The one who did a shit-ton of drugs and got kicked out of college. Before doctors connected my baby-age head trauma to the epilepsy, one of my sisters blamed it on my lifestyle. 

I carried these failures like poorly-healed burn scars.

In the book, I eventually called this part of me Susanna. She's the character who haunts Detective Deborah Samson: the ultimate failure, the descent into darkness that Deborah couldn't stop. Susanna's death is what pushes Deborah to leave the city, and it’s what makes her become a cop when she returns from war.

Susanna is every weak, atrophied, pitiful piece of my soul that I wanted to cut out.

And in 2017, I had found the perfect ideology to justify that amputation. The rage I called Temujin—Genghis Khan’s birth name—was the part of me that read Kaczynski and endorsed it. The part that wanted to cut out my weakness and softness. The part that believed strength meant control, domination; the compound in the desert where only the worthy survive.

Temujin wanted Susanna dead.

The obsessive fitness? Temujin punishing Susanna's weak body. The drugs and alcohol? Numbing her voice. The Kaczynski/MGTOW rabbit hole? The intellectual justification for why the weakness in me needed to be destroyed. The performative Buddhism? Spiritual bypassing, trying to transcend Susanna instead of facing her.

I couldn't write the book in 2017 because I was living inside Temujin's worldview. I hadn't met Deborah yet. The detective who investigates darkness instead of becoming it didn't exist in me.

You can't write about the war between light and shadow when you're too busy trying to murder half of yourself.

From 2021 to 2024, I struggled with serious suicidal ideation.

Temujin's desire to eliminate Susanna had expanded. It wasn't just about cutting out the weak parts anymore—it was about eliminating the whole thing. The logic was airtight in the darkest moments.

The book sat unfinished. I'd cycle back to it occasionally, add a chapter, feel like it wasn’t working or was too hard to fix, and then abandon it again. I was trying to write about a detective investigating darkness while I was drowning in it. I was trying to write about a man who kidnaps and tortures women while I was torturing myself daily.

The manuscript became another failure. Another thing Temujin could use as evidence that I should give up entirely.

The Doorway: Getting Sober

September 2024. I stopped drinking.

That sentence makes it sound simple. It wasn't.

Getting sober was the doorway, but what I walked through was eight years of accumulated spiritual debt. All those years of performing Buddhism, of consuming knowledge without integration, of numbing instead of feeling—the bill came due all at once.

This time, I did the actual work. Not the performance. Not the aesthetic.

Therapy. Real therapy, where I had to sit with the uncomfortable truths about who I'd been and what I'd done. Tarot, not as fortune-telling party tricks but as a mirror to reflect back the parts of myself I'd been avoiding. Rune work. Ritual work. Journaling that wasn't just venting but actual excavation of the psychic basement where I'd been throwing bodies for years.

I had to stop numbing myself to meet the parts of me I'd been running from.

And here's what I learned: Deborah could only emerge when I stopped trying to murder Susanna.

The detective is born from the wound. The healer emerges from the failure. The part of me that fights to stay good, that perseveres through struggle, that chooses to embrace darkness without surrendering to it: that part could only exist once I stopped treating my failures as something to be eliminated.

Deborah isn't the opposite of Temujin. She's what happens when you acknowledge the rage exists and choose something else anyway. She's the fortress-builder. The one who survived war but knows the war never really ends. She's the part of me that sought healing not through violence but through examination.

Shadow work isn't about killing your demons. It's about sitting across the table from them and asking questions until you understand why they're there.

The Book I Could Finally Write

June 2025. Nine months sober. I picked the book back up.

September 2025. One year sober. I finished it.

To Make the World Obey doesn't look like that book from 2017, but it's definitely the same book.

The porn star became Lucinda, a young sex worker found mutilated and dismembered in a dumpster. The boyfriend-turned-killer fractured into multiple antagonists: Temujin, the cult leader running a human trafficking ring from a warehouse basement where he keeps women in cages; Bartu, his lieutenant struggling with doubt; the mob figures like Lou Greaves and Peaches Augustine who treat human beings as commodities.

Detective Deborah Samson investigates. She's haunted by Susanna, by her own failures, by the three tours in a war that never left her nervous system. She builds fortresses in her mind to protect herself from the darkness she has to wade through daily. She's trying to save these women because she couldn't save Susanna.

The book became what I dub splatterpunk noir—extremely violent, unflinching in its depiction of human trafficking, torture, organized crime, and the ways trauma reshapes us into weapons or healers or both.

And here's the thing: Lucinda in the dumpster is what Temujin does to Susanna. It's what my rage wanted to do to my failures: mutilate them, dismember them, throw them away where no one would ever have to look at them again.

But Deborah only exists because of Susanna's death; the detective born from the wound. The cop forged from failure.

The book became the arena where these two parts of me fought it out. Temujin, who believes the soft parts deserve to be culled; who runs his Clan like a Mongolian warlord; who delivers speeches about strength and dominance while breaking women on makeshift torture devices. And Deborah, who descends into that basement, who faces the horror, who chooses to investigate the darkness.

I wrote the book I needed to write once I understood: I don't have to kill Susanna. I have to let Deborah examine her. I have to understand why she failed, what she was running from, what made her vulnerable in the first place.

The book is still about power, corruption, and decay. But now it's also about what happens when you stop trying to amputate your shadow and start integrating it instead.

It took eight years because I needed to become someone capable of writing it. Someone who'd done the work. Someone who'd gotten sober and faced the basement where I'd been keeping my own prisoners.

What Emerged

To Make the World Obey is proof that you can face the parts of yourself you want to kill and choose integration instead. It's proof that you can write about extreme darkness without being consumed by it. It's proof that shadow work isn't about becoming a better person - it's about becoming a whole person.

This book is raw because I am a wound. It's violent because the war between Temujin and Deborah is violent. It's unflinching because I couldn't afford to flinch anymore. It exists because I chose to investigate my darkness instead of surrendering to it.

Between 2017 and 2024, Temujin nearly won. The rage, the ideology, the belief that weakness deserves elimination—it almost took me out. But Deborah emerged from sobriety and shadow work, and she did what detectives do: she investigated until she understood.

If you've done your own shadow work, you'll recognize these battles. If you've met your own Temujin - the part of you that wants to burn it all down, that's sick of being soft and weak, that fantasizes about strength through dominance—you'll see him in these pages.

If you've had to build your own Deborah—the part that examines instead of destroys; that chooses healing over numbing; that faces the basement no matter how much it costs—you'll see her, too.

And if you're drawn to darkness—if you want fiction that doesn't sanitize or soften the horror of what people do to each other and themselves—this book won't flinch.

To Make the World Obey is a splatterpunk noir novel about serial killers, human trafficking, organized crime, and the detectives who hunt monsters while fighting their own. It's about power, corruption, and decay. It's about the bodies we throw in dumpsters—literal and metaphorical—and the ones who refuse to let them disappear.

It took me eight years, an epilepsy diagnosis, three years of suicidal ideation, sobriety, therapy, tarot, runes, and ritual work to write it.

It took surviving Temujin to create Deborah.

If that sounds like your kind of darkness, the book is waiting for you.

To Make the World Obey releases 10/15/25. Available now for pre-order.