jroyaldoran
Upon receiving the news of his estranged father’s death, the surviving heir, Robert Eisenhart, returns to the family home, in Western Pennsylvania, to bury his father and sell the estate. When he arrives at the farm, unsettling things start to happen. He smells the stench of death in the house, has flashes of disturbing memories and nightmares of brutality
Distressed by his recent behavior and dreams, Robert hires a therapist to help him make sense of what is going on inside him. The repressed memories uncovered, open a doorway to his past. The psychologist assures Robert that his vivid nightmares are not memories, but the mind’s way for processing memories. Memories his father’s passing has triggered.
Robert goes through the possessions left behind. He discovers a collection of swords and spears under his parents mattress. A sealed box, on the closet floor, is filled with sadist pornography. He is sickened.
Inside a small gray lockbox is a paper. A hand sketch of a triangle with a large circled X and a cluster of twenty-eight small crosses, with six more set apart. The discoveries Robert makes, following the map, cause more and more nightmares. With each new find, he remembers more, and begins to uncover the dark patrimony buried deep beneath the surface.
COMING SOON!
Selected short stories from one of J. Royal's favorite writing spots, Table 5 at Bar Juanjo in Valencia, Spain. Spaning decades and social themes it is hard-hitting prose and graphic realism about the most taboo subjects in the modern world-truths.
Meet JRoyalDoran
His Vision
J. Royal Doran is an avant-garde writer whose work confronts the brutal, disturbing, and dystopian realities embedded in modern American life. Rejecting the confines of traditional literary doctrine, Doran dismantles conventional notions of art and narrative structure, challenging the academic orthodoxy that has long governed contemporary fiction. He dismisses James Joyce’s concept of the epiphany as obsolete in a fractured postmodern age, replacing it with a raw, unfiltered literary vision rooted in chaos, contradiction, and psychological realism.
As the creator of anti-fiction and lit-pulp—two hybrid, genre-defying forms—Doran embraces unrestricted expression over the sanitization imposed by modern review culture and consensus-driven criticism. His work rejects performative intellectualism and the mediocrity of mass opinion, instead pursuing literature that is confrontational, immersive, and uncompromising.
J. Royal Doran left the United States and now lives in Spain with his wife, continuing to chronicle the cultural and moral implosion of America from abroad. Shaped by a nomadic upbringing, military service, higher education, and decades of entrepreneurial experience, Doran writes with the perspective of a lifelong observer and participant in the American experiment. Across five decades of social upheaval and decline, his work stands as both testimony and indictment of the American way of life.
A narrative artist influenced by a life of travel, he honed his craft through Creative writing at Indiana University and workshops led by L. K. Abbott, along with American Short Fiction and other programs.
Originally from West Point, New York, nestled in the stunning Hudson River Valley, J. Royal dedicated his early years to exploring the mountains and the Army Academy. Growing up as the child of a career military person, he relocated numerous times, experiencing various regions of the country, which shaped his distinctive view of Americana reflected in his work.
Stories Told
Hard-hitting stories on modern American life. The isolation, emotional trauma, the inherent violence in a society lacking any real identity or sense of community. In a moral vacuum, devoid of purpose, a nation imploding into an anarchistic and animal brutality reflected in J. Royal Doran's work.
Postmodern Angst
Exploring technology’s isolating grip, it becomes clear how it disconnects us from one another and the world around us, severing personal interaction and genuine human connection.
Fear & Hope
Stories of a world on the edge of the Apocalypse, where the polluted skies rain death and despair while humanity clings to the threads of hope, waiting for a miracle to unfold, that never arrives.
Hard Truths
Stories that cut through the noise of modern isolation and the ever increasing violence of the world around us.
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