(Psst! If you want to REALLY know about my books in super-secret ways I don’t share publicly, click here to join my email list. I promise it’s not lame like other authors’ lists sometimes are. Seriously. Mine has unicorns.)
As I was prepping this site, I asked my wife what readers (potentially new readers) might want or need to know from me that I haven’t told you already. I can guess what you’re curious about, but it’s only a guess. I’m the author, not the reader. I don’t know what questions you might have.
She said, “If I were new, I’d want to know which book I should read first. Or if I already knew you, I’d want to know what to read next.”
That jibed, because we authors are told to put our “reading order” on our websites. I don’t have an overall reading order because my series are all independent of one another, but there’s often a definite reading order within a given series … and that “ideal order” isn’t always obvious.
So I’m going to try to help you decide what to read first or next from me … and then to show you how I’d read that individual series (if you choose a series instead of a stand-alone book).
But do keep in mind that the SERIES below are in random order. I’m not saying you should read Fat Vampire before Unicorn Western, for instance. Instead, I suggest you read through the description of each series below and see which one grabs your attention … and then, if you want the optimal experience, follow the reading order I’ve given for that series.
Here’s what I’ve got:
Fat Vampire
Fat Vampire was my second book, with only the semi-autobiographical tome The Bialy Pimps before it. It’s a story about an underdog who’s not considered “perfect enough” for his new society. Fat Vampire was also adapted into a SyFy Network TV show called Reginald the Vampire, starring Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds) from the Marvel movies.
I suggest reading the six “core series” books first, starting with the one pictured above, and only THEN reading the four-book side series that begins with The Vampire Maurice. The The Vampire Maurice series (sometimes confusingly called “The Fat Vampire Chronicles” series, which is a different series than “Fat Vampire”) happens during the events of the first Fat Vampire book, but I wrote it after the core series was complete, so it’s full of things that will be more satisfying to read if you’ve read Fat Vampire first. There’s also a prequel in the world called Game of Fangs. And again: It’s a prequel, but I’d suggest reading it last because I wrote it last.
(That’s actually my logic for every reading order: I’m always going to suggest that you read book in the order I wrote them, regardless of their chronological order.)
So basically, I personally would choose to read them in this order:
- Fat Vampire 1-6
- Then The Vampire Maurice 1-4
- Then Game of Fangs.
You can get all of the Fat Vampire books at a discount at my online store.
Gore Point
Gore Point is one of my new favorites. It’s about a firefighter-like brigade of demon-fighters who guard a “thin spot” between our world and Hell, slaughtering the demons that emerge from rifts that keep forming. They work in two parts: Legions, who fight the spawn, and Stitchers, who close the rifts … until new ones inevitably open. The system has worked fine for decades, but now it looks like maybe Hell has been sandbagging, with the help of a saboteur.
Gore Point is a simple trilogy, so no real question about the reading order.
You can check out Gore Point here.
Unicorn Western
Ah, Sean’s and my most gonzo series! It’s what it sounds like: a gunslinger rides a talking unicorn who’s also a total asshole. UW is one of the few books that’s okay for kids to read. Sean and I wrote it when our kids were in their tweens, and they all read it. There’s no swearing and only light, Western-style violence.
The premise is silly, but by the end the scope is enormous: still safe for kids, but definitely adult-level complexity by the final page. People compare the complete saga to The Dark Tower. There are 9 short books in the core series (sometimes bundled into “Full Saga” you see above, plus a prequel called Unicorn Genesis. A side book called Unicorn Heathens is coming in 2025 or beyond, followed by Unicorn Apocalypse, which chronicles events that come after Unicorn Western.
As before, I’d recommend reading in the order I wrote them, which is above.
You can get all of the Unicorn Western books at a discount at my online store.
Robot Proletariat
Robot Proletariat is a super fun sci-fi read about robots who learn sentience and then battle other factions of robots who want to overthrow the human world. It’s a 5-book series written in serial format — which is incidental; you’ll get used to it.
In order, the books are:
- Robot Proletariat
- The Infinite Loop
- The Hard Reset
- Cascade Failure
- Reboot
There’s also a side book called En3my (which, again, I’d read after the above). There’s also a short story out there somewhere I need to find called “Adapted Memory.” If you ever read that one, read it LAST because it’s full of spoilers.
You can get all of the Robot Proletariat books at a discount at my online store.
Dead City
Dead City is the series I suggest people start with more often than any other. It’s not that it’s our best (though I think it’s really damn good); it’s that it feels the most universally accessible for readers of my types of books. It’s a good on-ramp to the craziness of the Truantverse, in other words.
Dead City looks like a zombie series, but it’s not — not really. It’s more accurately a biological thriller. I have a genetics degree, so I found I couldn’t write zombies in a normal way because “the normal way” makes zero scientific sense. Our book instead follows a zombie-making virus and a drug that keeps zombieism at bay … until the drug stops working and the fragile society built around it falls into bloody chaos. It’s about as “realistic” as zombies are going to get. I even talked to friends of mine who are scientists and pharmacologists to get the details right.
There are three books in the series: Dead City, Dead Nation, and Dead Planet, in that order. You’ll probably want to read the prequel novella Dead Zero after the core series. Then, if you want to crush your soul and feel depressed for a while, you could read the short story “Empty Nest.”
You can get all of the Dead City books at a discount at my online store.
The Beam
Oh, the epicness! There are five seasons of The Beam, and they’re some of the most in-depth, thoughtful, built-out stuff Sean and I have written together. It’s about the rise of warring power factions in a future world dominated by an omniscient (and increasingly self-aware) AI network.
This is many readers’ favorite series by far … and, fun note: We wrote it before AI became mainstream. Funny how much we’re getting right already.
There are a few side books in the Beam world, but the weirdest is Plugged: a fictional book that’s written as if it were nonfiction, attributed to an author we made up named Sterling Gibson. “Sterling Gibson” is actually me and Sean, but he’s also a character in later seasons of The Beam. He’s also basically Malcolm Gladwell. So if you can imagine a future Malcolm Gladwell writing about his world in a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way, that’s what this book is. Plugged explains the world of The Beam, how it was made, and what it means for our characters’ society.
There’s also a prequel in the same world called Future Proof, as well as possibly my favorite series of all: The Future of Sex. FOS tells the story of a chosen-one-type prodigy named Chloe Shaw who becomes extremely important in the later core-series books.
(Note: FOS was originally written with a ton of spice, but we eventually toned it down to a hard R because all the sexiness confused the story and repelled readers who weren’t into it. The current version is edgy, but not X. And by the way, you do not need to read FOS to understand the later seasons of The Beam. It’ll make those later seasons cooler, but it’s not necessary.)
As always, I like the idea of reading in the order I wrote the books because that way each read is informed by what I knew at the time. That order is:
- The Beam: Season One
- Plugged
- The Beam: Season Two
- The Beam: Season Three
- The Future of Sex
- The Beam: Season Four
- Future Proof
- The Beam: Season Five
I know that order is weird. You absolutely CAN just read the core series or read in a different order, but the above is probably ideal if you’re asking and want the most thorough Beam experience. We wrote the outliers in between complete seasons, so each later book is informed by the ones before.
You can get all of The Beam books at a discount at my online store.
The Dream Engine
Like Unicorn Western, The Dream Engine is kid-safe but has mostly been read by adults. We wrote it when our kids were a few years older than they were for UW, and it’s meant to be a teen sort of book.
We wrote The Dream Engine as part of a writing experiment: a 2014 Kickstarter campaign called Fiction Unboxed wherein we promised to write the first book live, in 30 days, starting from nothing, while a thousand people watched us do it. Its best genre is “steampunk YA,” and it’s about a fantasy world in which dreams are harvested to make what the people need … with terrible consequences.
Oh, and you should SEE how big the world gets by the final book!
There are five books in the series (The Dream Engine, The Nightmare Factory, The Ruby Room, The Pandora Core, and The Engine Convergence), plus a prequel novella called The Tinkerer’s Mainspring that I suggest reading last.
You can get all of the Dream Engine books at a discount at my online store.
Invasion
Invasion began as a can’t-put-it-down action series about an alien invasion, but it quickly got all “Truant” and developed into an epic, multi-layered story that I’d compare in scope and feel to Battlestar Galactica — what with all the philosophical/political/social ramifications … and the way the entire world inverts and plays havoc with time and memory by the end.
There’s definitely more than meets the eye with Invasion. People yelled at us because they couldn’t stop reading the first few books and ended up staying awake all night devouring them, but then we got all deep by the seventh book, and that made them question everything because it’s so different from the way the series began. Invasion is EXTREMELY representative of what Sean and I do in a long series: We start out straightforward, then bend all of reality by the finale. (Oh, and by the way, the cover above says “Avery Blake,” but that’s a pen name. Sean was my co-author on everything here that I didn’t write solo, including Invasion.)
The books are:
- Invasion
- Contact
- Colonization
- Annihilation
- Judgment
- Extinction
- Resurrection
And then there’s a 3-book spinoff series that’s a ton of fun and for some weird-ass reason features Buc-ee’s Beaver Nuggets. It’s called Save the City:
- Save the City
- Save the Girl
- Save the World
Lastly, there’s a prequel called Longshot. I’d read Longshot last, but you could also read it after the core 7-book series … or first, if you wanted.
The Tomorrow Gene
This fun sci-fi series began with this premise: A nefarious company begins selling clones of celebrities as sex slaves. It became more than that, of course, with mind-bending consequences.
There are three books in the core series, but this one is interesting in that my favorite book in the world is actually the prequel, called Null Identity. I just loved writing that one. It’s full of misdirection and confusion, and I dig shit like that.
You can get all of the Tomorrow Gene books at a discount at my online store.
Stand-Alone Books
Stand-alones are my favorite books to write these days. I’m a completist; I like to begin and then end without leaving dangling loose ends to hopefully follow up on later, which is what any series requires. I love these books because they’re self-contained. Here’s what I’ve got:
- The Bialy Pimps – My first book: a rollicking and ridiculous story that you could think of as “Clerks in a bagel deli.”
- Pattern Black – A mindbender about a man in a future prison, with hooks in both his body and memory.
- Pretty Killer – A noir revenge mystery centered on a locked-in dinner party: Truant and Platt do Agatha Christie.
- Cursed – Technically a series of 9 novellas in one omnibus, about a cursed shapeshifter. This is our most serious, most authentically horror book, with almost none of our trademark humor.
- Winter Break – A yet-unreleased YA mystery that I wrote for my 16-year-old daughter. Stay tuned on this one.
- Namaste – A pure action thriller about a deadly monk on a leveling-up quest for vengeance that, honestly, sort of feels like a video game (bigger boss, bigger boss, bigger boss …)
- The Target – A twisty, turny, Fight-Club-style story about a pair of brother assassins in an all-guns-out fight to kill their target before other assassins get him first.
- La Fleur de Blanc – This one’s genre is tritely called “women’s fiction,” but you can think of it as a backstabbing tale of a woman fighting for her dream amongst the bitchy residents of a highfalutin California shopping plaza. (I kind of hate the droll nature of that description, so you’ll just have to trust me: La Fleur is super fun. One of my wife’s favorites.)
- Axis of Aaron – Sean and I wrote this one based solely on a pre-existing cover and a mandate to write something that was “literary as fuck.” It’s a twisty mindjob about a man lost inside his own memories.
- Devil May Care – This is probably my favorite standalone. It’s technically a literary novel, but we did some seriously crazy stuff with timelines and perception. I also love the language itself in this one: the way we put the words together.
- Screenplay – A Black Mirror-esque tale of a woman being led through increasingly disturbing twists and turns as part of the ultimate techno-scam.
- The Island – Hoo boy. Only read this one if you just love my work and want something weird. I wrote The Islandas an experiment to see what happened if I started with a situation (two immortal kings stranded together in a place even they don’t understand) but had no plot at all. I love the way it turned out, but be ready for a nutty ride if you pick this one up!
- Burnout – After being replaced by an automated truck, an ingenious “unacknowledged” mechanic goes all hillbilly-justice on those who wronged him.
- Sick and Wired – A rich and lonely man buys a nurse robot to care for his dying mother … then finds himself developing feelings for her as backstabbing relatives fight for the family fortune.
- Everyone Gets Divorced – A pure comedy that tells the story of a divorce told How I Met Your Mother style. I know I wrote it, but I laugh aloud whenever I revisit it.
- Greens – A comedy about a clever shop worker who decides to sell weed that isn’t actually weed, because true marketing is in the sizzle.
- Fiends – It’s like Friends, but with classic movie monsters. Need I say more? I don’t think this one was ever published, but it’s finished, so expect it eventually.
- Decoy Wallet – One of my dad’s favorites, based on my friend Dave and his paranoia. Dad says it reminds him of A Confederacy of Dunces.
Hopefully now you know where to begin, or what to read next. If you have questions or would like a personal recommendation, just reply to this and ask!
Thanks for being a reader!