Hi, I'm Keith Rich, a writer in Missoula MT

Dark Tales

Cosmic Horror

Dark Fantasy

Sci-Fi

Don’t Expect a Feel-Good, Nice, or Friendly Magical Experience.

The shadows have teeth. Nothing is sacred.

I grew up practicing High Magic. I walked away from it when I got sober, but I never stopped carrying what I learned there.

Now I am finally opening the vault.

My fiction draws from a lifetime of dark insights, old magical traditions, historical events, archaeology, and the uncomfortable places where those things intersect. I hold a Master’s Degree in Anthropology with a specialization in Archaeology, and that background follows me into the things I write. History matters. The objects matter. The rituals matter. The dead had reasons for doing what they did.

Magic in my stories is not a friendly system of spells waiting to be mastered. It has weight. It has history. It has consequences. Sometimes the person performing the ritual understands those consequences. Sometimes they only think they do. My horror follows the same rule.

The human body is not protected because it belongs to the protagonist. Sanity is not protected because the reader needs an explanation. Good people are not protected because they are good. I am interested in what remains when those protections disappear, when a person becomes an object, a component, a vessel, a meal, or simply something standing between an older thing and what it wants.

These stories live somewhere between Blue-Collar Noir and Cosmic Nihilism, filled with industrial bleach, ancient brine, anaerobic rot, forgotten gods, bad decisions, and ordinary people who discover that the darkness does not particularly care what they believe.

There are no safe shadows here.

They have teeth.

Let us discuss AI use shall we. When I first self-published on Amazon readers took my writing and ran it through an AI model to determine if the book was written by AI. The texts they tested were written far before AI existed however AI claimed they were written by AI so the book reviews claimed it was AI written and it cost me reputation. I no longer use AI for automated editing.

Dark, Disturbing, Horror

Books on Amazon

Coming SOON to Amazon !!!

A Devil’s Plaything and other tales

Four Stories of Dark Magic and Transformation

186 pages | Horror Collection | Keith Rich

All four stories have been entirely rewritten and expanded for this edition.

Magic works. That is the problem.

A Devil’s Plaything collects four dark stories about people who reach into places they do not understand and discover that the supernatural does not care what they intended. An occultist's meticulously constructed ritual succeeds in ways he cannot comprehend. An ancient Mayan codex begins physically rewriting the man who possesses it. A woman experimenting with her grandfather's forbidden library discovers that demons are considerably more complicated than the warnings suggest. And a professional death-scene cleaner finds something in a decomposing man's house that has already begun changing him.

These are stories of real magic with physical consequences, where transformation is rarely metaphorical and curiosity can become a contract the body is forced to honor.

Four completely rewritten stories. 186 pages. No safe magic.

Becoming and other tales

Three Stories of Transformation and Ruin

81 pages | Extreme Horror / Occult Horror / Dark Fantasy | Keith Rich

COMING VERY SOON

Three stories. Three people who cross a boundary. None of them come back unchanged.

Silas has a girlfriend, a temporary job, and plans for Friday night. Then his body simply stops working. He remains conscious while doctors declare him dead, seal him inside a body bag, and place him in a refrigerated morgue drawer. When he finally escapes, the world insists he has been dead for days, while his own deteriorating body begins insisting on something considerably worse. Silas desperately tries to resume an ordinary life even as his senses disappear, his anatomy changes, and something begins scratching from inside his bones.

In “The Blackwood Kopis,” scrapyard worker Greg discovers an ancient curved blade embedded in twisted metal. One bare-handed touch doesn't merely show him the weapon's history. It places him inside another man's memories, another time, and another body, where the scrapyard disappears beneath bronze armor, Mediterranean heat, and the approaching collision of shields.

And in “Queely Archive,” Deb returns from Salt Lake City to the frozen industrial landscape of Rock Springs, Wyoming, where poisoned water, political corruption, and an obscure ritual manual begin converging. Armed with improvised ritual hardware made from railroad iron, copper pipe, and hand-cut Sumerian symbols, she climbs above the Queely mine to perform magic she understands just well enough to know that getting it wrong may leave part of her behind.

Becoming moves from biological transformation to historical possession to real-world High Magic, but every story asks essentially the same question:

How much of you can change before the person who started the journey no longer exists?

Three stories. 81 pages. Becoming something is easy. Becoming yourself again is another matter.

Demon Sleep and other tales

72 pages | Horror Collection | Keith Rich

All four stories have been entirely rewritten and expanded for this edition. These are not simple reprints of the original versions.

Demon Sleep collects four stories about predators, bargains, desperation, and the moment something believed to be under control turns around and begins studying the person who summoned it. An ancient incubus enters the dreams of a man expecting to manipulate human desire, only to discover a predator whose appetites even a demon cannot understand. A professional killer accepts one final job and becomes entangled in a conspiracy that begins rewriting his body as efficiently as it dismantles his employer’s empire. Elsewhere, the collection moves through older horrors, human desperation, and the terrible consequences of choices made when every available option is already wrong.

The collection contains “Demon’s Sleep,” “Last Deed of Kramen,” “Dead Weight,” and “No Intent.” Each has been rebuilt into a substantially different version, with expanded scenes, stronger characterization, additional mythology, and material that did not appear in the earlier stories. Readers familiar with the originals should not expect to simply encounter the same stories with cleaner prose.

Four completely rewritten stories. 72 pages. Familiar titles, very different nightmares.

Component Alyle and other tales

In a Perfect Society, Failing a Test Is a Death Sentence.

| Dystopian Science Fiction / AI Science Fiction | Keith Rich

COMING VERY SOON

Alyle has spent his life believing in the New World. Then he gets sick, fails a citizenship placement test, and discovers exactly what his perfect society does with people it considers intellectually unnecessary: it recycles them. His organs have already been assigned to recipients. His identity has become a clerical problem awaiting disposal.

Escaping into a hidden civilization beneath the city, Alyle discovers generations of people the system forgot, along with something the society above has almost forgotten entirely: books, history, and the idea that human worth cannot be reduced to a score. The failed student soon becomes indispensable. His knowledge of artificial intelligence may provide the underground population with the one weapon capable of defeating the machines policing them: a video game the AI cannot stop trying to solve.

But Component Alyle grows beyond one fugitive's escape. The struggle encompasses hidden populations, autonomous machines, artificial intelligence, and a desperate attempt to abandon the civilization that decided some forms of intelligence—and some forms of life—were disposable. Alyle's discovery becomes the key to disabling the world's droids long enough for millions of forgotten people to attempt an escape of their own.

A society measured intelligence. Alyle failed.
The society made the mistake of letting him live long enough to prove the test wrong.

Mistress’s Crown

One Night. One Lie. One Debt That Refuses to Stay Buried.

| Extreme / Psychological / Cosmic Horror | Keith Rich

COMING VERY SOON

Elias has built the kind of life people are supposed to want.

A steady job. A quiet house. A woman he loves. A wedding only days away.

And he's beginning to wonder whether somewhere along the way, safety became another kind of prison.

When Sarah leaves town for three days, Elias goes looking for a piece of the man he used to be. One drink at a dark industrial club called The Ossuary is supposed to be harmless. Instead, his drink is altered, his memories fracture, and he wakes carrying evidence of a night he cannot completely remember.

Then the Woman in Black comes back.

She has photographs. She knows where Elias lives. She wears an obsidian crown that remains strangely solid even when everything else begins to distort. And she wants $20,000 for her silence. Elias could tell Sarah the truth. Instead, terrified that the photographs tell a simpler story than his fractured memories ever could, he pays.

That is his second mistake.

Because the money was never the point.

What begins as blackmail becomes obsession, guilt, violence, and eventually something far older than the human woman Elias thought he met. When he finally returns to The Ossuary carrying a cable knife, believing murder can sever the thing attached to his life, he discovers that killing the Woman in Black doesn't end their relationship.

It opens it.

Soon Elias and Sarah's ordinary home becomes the center of something impossible. The dead don't remain human. Bodies become architecture. The Woman's court gathers. And the obsidian crown presides over a nightmare in which love, betrayal, marriage, ownership, and flesh have all become parts of the same ritual.

Elias thought his worst mistake was lying to the woman he loved.
He was wrong.
His worst mistake was believing the other woman was human.

Entirely rewritten from front to back!

The Wheeler Rituals

Along the Colorado Pacific Trail, a calculated psychopath stalks his prey from the seat of a diesel BMW motorcycle, his face hidden behind a horned deer skull mask. He is a predator who views existence as a mistake, a nihilist who seeks to provide his victims with the "logical" mercy of a "perfect, painless nothingness."

Using ritual tools crafted from human remains—flutes carved from ribs and coils of skin-rope—he orchestrates a descent into the ancient caves of the Wheeler Formation. His goal: eleven victims to serve as vessels for the Eleven Demons of Tiamat. The Wheeler Rituals is a graphic dive into the intersection of ritualistic murder and ancient Sumerian myth, featuring a killer who doesn't just want to end lives, but to erase the very concept of a future.

"They look at me and they see a predator, or a father, or a provider. They never see the truth. They never see that I am the end of the line... I am the period at the end of their sentence."

Out very soon, currently doing a final few rewrites. New non-AI cover as well is displayed!

The Gatewalker Trilogy

In the heart of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, a tome of predatory power was forged in the ash, eventually drifting through the shadows of history to the desolate plains of Rock Springs, Wyoming. This is the Malconsilicon, the "Book Zero" of the Gatewalker Series, and it carries the Vane Prints—shattered fragments of a cosmic truth that eventually fall into the hands of a boy named Ken.

Cursed with hyperlexia, Ken is a non-conformist in a 1980s world that cannot see the lattice of symbols he deciphers with ease. Guided by the Sumerian goddess Nisaba, he must use his unique mind to correct the fractured lore of the Necronomicon and navigate the perilous Seven Gates of the Ladder of Lights. Blending Lovecraftian dread with authentic magical rites and rituals, the series follows Ken’s descent into a realm of ancient pacts where he must master the forbidden to survive the entities waiting beyond the stars. Based in the desert coal town of Rock Springs WY, this is a gritty real magic series with some back bone.

I am currently seeking a literary agent to help me sell them.

I am doing more work than the average artist to create a No-AI product. I wrote most of my stories before AI was developed, the problem is I have written and dropped thousands of short stories all over from 2000 through 2016 and most likely many of those stories would have been used to train the actual AI. The result of this is that I am now using AI to determine how AI my writing is so I can rewrite it until the AI no longer identifies my writing as AI. That I have to do because the anti-AI people will continue to report my non-AI work as AI because their AI told them is was written by AI. Yet, this sounds odd but is entirely the world we live in. I have had to adapt.

My ART is being taken to Non-AI as we speak. Covers are being designed in Phtotoshop and I found an artist that is willing to create my art for 300.00 per cover. This page will reflect that as we go!

THE AI ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Yes, I have used AI.

When I first self published I used AI to help edit my writing and create book covers. I did not use it to invent a lifetime of stories, characters, experiences, research, or ideas. All of my writings dates from 2010 to 2016, years before the current generation of AI writing tools existed.

I didn't initially understand that there was a growing group of readers who considered using AI for editing or cover creation enough reason to condemn an entire book. I learned that the unpleasant way, through attacks in online forums and reviews of my books.

But something about those accusations immediately struck me as absurd.

The people accusing writers of using AI are using AI-powered detection tools to decide who used AI.

Apparently AI cannot be trusted to help an author edit a sentence, but it can be trusted to interrogate that sentence and determine who wrote it. That contradiction sits at the center of my problem with the entire accusation.

ASK THE MACHINE IF I USED A MACHINE

Tools such as AI-writing detectors are being used as evidence that writers secretly generated their work.

Stop and consider what is happening.Someone suspects that I relied too heavily upon a machine. Instead of reading my book and judging the writing, they give my writing to another machine and ask it to judge me.

The machine produces an answer.

The answer from the machine is then presented as evidence that I relied upon a machine.

If AI is so unreliable, artificial, derivative, and incapable of understanding human writing that using it contaminates my work, why does handing my work to another AI suddenly produce a trustworthy judgment about its authorship?

You cannot have that argument both ways.Either these systems deserve skepticism when making judgments about human writing, or they don't.

THERE IS ANOTHER PROBLEM: I WAS APPARENTLY USING AI BEFORE IT EXISTED

I have writing from 2010–2016.

When older writing displays the same characteristics that people or detection systems now identify as signs of AI, we have a fairly obvious problem. Unless I owned a time machine, modern generative AI did not write something I wrote in 2012.

Yet I am now doing something I never imagined would be necessary: going through my old writing and changing portions of it so prose written before modern generative AI existed doesn't look like AI to people and systems searching for its supposed fingerprints.

Think about the absurdity of that.

My writing has to change because AI learned to write in ways that sometimes resemble human writing, and then another automated system may conclude that the human must therefore be AI. And somehow the human is the one expected to prove his innocence.

READ THE DAMN BOOK

This is where I stop accepting the premise.

If you want to criticize my writing, read it.

Tell me the dialogue sucks. Tell me a character doesn't work. Tell me I spent three pages describing something that deserved three sentences. Tell me the ending fell apart. Tell me the book bored you, disturbed you, confused you, pissed you off, or made you throw it across the room.

Those are judgments about writing.

But don't tell me that trusting AI to edit makes my work illegitimate and then turn around and trust AI to determine whether I used it.

You are using the thing you are accusing me of using. Worse, you're using it for a more consequential purpose.

I used AI as a tool to help edit words I had already written. The accuser uses an automated tool to make a judgment about who created those words in the first place.

Which one of us is actually giving the machine more authority? I am willing to question what AI did to my sentences. Are the people accusing writers with AI detectors equally willing to question what AI tells them?

I FOUND OUT AI CAN DAMAGE WRITING TOO

My experience with AI editing has not convinced me that AI is some magical replacement for an author. Quite the opposite. I have seen firsthand what happens when I give an automated editor too much freedom. It can flatten a voice. It can remove intentional repetition. It can mistake something strange for something incorrect. It can make prose cleaner while making the story worse.I have had to go back into my own manuscripts and restore things that should never have disappeared.

Experience changed how I work.

AI is a tool.

Which brings us straight back to AI detection.

Why would I blindly trust AI to determine authorship when I won't even blindly trust it to edit a paragraph?

I won't.

And neither should anyone accusing another human being of something on the strength of an automated judgment.

SO WHAT AM I DOING ABOUT MY BOOKS?

I'm doing this the hard way.

I am going back through my manuscripts, including material written long before generative AI became part of my editing process, and examining the prose myself. I'm removing generic language that doesn't sound like me, restoring material damaged or flattened during editing, replacing AI-generated cover art, and rewriting older passages that have characteristics now commonly associated with AI.

There is an enormous irony in that last part.

I am manually rewriting human-written prose so that AI won't accuse it of being AI-written.

That sentence alone should tell us something has gone badly wrong with the way this conversation is being conducted.

I'm also not going to pretend I never used AI simply because admitting it became inconvenient.

I did.

I used it for editing and cover creation. I learned where I think it helped. I learned where it hurt. I changed the way I use it because of those experiences.

The stories are mine.

The characters are mine.

The research is mine.

The experiences behind them are mine.

The strange shit is definitely mine.

THE QUESTION GOES BOTH WAYS

So if you arrived here because someone told you that AI wrote my books, I have a request.

Read one.

Judge it.

If you think it's terrible, say it's terrible. If you find something that sounds artificial, point to it. If you think a character is hollow, tell me why. If you think the prose fails, criticize the prose.

But if your evidence that a machine wrote my book is that another machine told you so, don't be surprised when I question your evidence.

If using AI means I surrendered my judgment as an author, then using AI to determine whether I am an author deserves exactly the same scrutiny.

No I wouldn’t use an AI as part of my writing process, however the Anti-AI crowd require it. Everything I write has to be run through an AI detector AI and edited to show a human wrote it. This process makes my writing diffrent.

Read the writing before you decide who wrote it.

Dark Horror, Cosmic Horror

I do not write the fluffy frilly magic stuff because I have seen the real thing. I practiced magic from a child until I got clean and sober many years ago. I have written as a hobby all my life and have honestly been sitting behind a computer screen since 1976. As a former practicer I now channel that raw real world experience of magic and the occult into my works to produce a heavy Lovecraftian style experience of horror, dread, or warning to my readers.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse