Tales From an Independent Author . . .

It's been a long road to get to this point. Writing a finish book is a great mountain to climb. As it turns out, it maybe the easy part. Follow my journey . . .

I'm going to do it!

I was without a steady job from year and half years. So, why not give this cab driving thing a go? With death lurking at every corner, or if not death, many seeing you as the true "cash cab" (as the cash I would carry, would be attractive to those who might want to separate me from my cash).

I've now published three books and the hardest part is to figure out where you fit in the world. Fiction of course, well with the exception of my book Education of a Cab Driver, which is my tales from being a cab driver; but there are metaphysical elements to even that book.. But the other book, have elements of metaphysics, thriller and psychological components. At one point, I thought I was in the Blakes Crouch orbit. I did some research into the elements; I have in Sanctuary series an ordinary joe (a high school football) who goes through a resurrection (not a near death) he was in the morgue. The question I was asking, what would happen if a Jesus-like figure showed up in modern America? To be clear, he’s not Jesus, but that doesn’t stop people from making that connection. In my new book, Losing Grip, I have a character stuck in a dream world and reality, and it gets hard for him to separate the two. So he is losing grip on reality. 

In both stories, I don’t explain how this happens, which puts me in a different category. It appears I fall under the Magical Realism category. Below are the search results. I’m using Gemini to conduct the search.     

The search: Create a list of authors through history who write in Magical Realism

The Latin American Boom Pioneers & Early Influences

Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia): Widely considered the architect who popularized magical realism, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His masterpieces include One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Juan Rulfo (Mexico): Often cited as a primary influence on García Márquez, his 1955 novel Pedro Páramo used haunting dream-logic that laid the foundation for the literary movement.

Isabel Allende (Chile): Her 1982 debut, The House of the Spirits, is frequently compared to García Márquez's work and weaves political upheaval with everyday occurrences of ghosts and telekinesis.

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): A pioneer of surrealism and philosophical fiction, his 1944 short story collection Ficciones introduced concepts like infinite labyrinths that deeply informed magical realism.

Global Masters

Salman Rushdie (India/UK): His 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight's Children uses magical realism to explore the history of modern India by endowing children born at independence with magical powers.

Haruki Murakami (Japan): Known for blending reality-bending magical realism with jazz and pop culture in labyrinthine epics like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.

Toni Morrison (USA): Used supernatural elements as a physical manifestation of grief and historical memory to confront the lingering trauma of slavery in Beloved.

Laura Esquivel (Mexico): Merges domestic life and the supernatural in Like Water for Chocolate, using cooking as a medium where intense emotions are baked into food.

Modern Masters & Domestic Fabulists

Jesmyn Ward: Weaves heavy, ancestral supernatural elements into the gritty realities of rural Mississippi in works like Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: A Mexican-Canadian author who masterfully blends Mexican folklore and myth with grounded character studies, such as in Gods of Jade and Shadow.

Kevin Wilson: Known for treating bizarre, impossible premises with deadpan domestic normalcy in works like Nothing to See Here.

Emily Habeck: Uses high-concept surrealism, such as a man transforming into a Great White shark, as a raw metaphor for terminal illness and grief in Shark Heart.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Brings a cozy, minimalist structure to the genre by isolating magical elements to a single Tokyo basement café in Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Karen Russell: Finds the mythic, strange underbelly of the American landscape in fabulist works like Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Aimee Bender: Explores emotional truths through supernatural abilities in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.

Karen Thompson Walker: Scales apocalyptic phenomena down to suburban, micro-level drama in The Age of Miracles.

Tom Perrotta: Grounds the unexplainable vanishing of 2% of the population in a realistic character study of grief in The Leftovers.

Kelly Link: Features ordinary people navigating deeply uncanny worlds in her short story collection Get in Trouble.

Interesting company. Currently I am reading books for Huraki Murakami and Karen Thompson Walker. My confusion came due the writing style of Blake Crouch and myself are so similar. So I wondered about him.

Question: Does Blake Crouch fit in this group?

No, Blake Crouch does not fit into the magical realism group.

While his books certainly feature extraordinary and mind-bending events, he operates in entirely different genres. Crouch is primarily known for fast-paced, high-concept sci-fi and speculative tech thrillers, as well as psychological horror and crime fiction.

Here is why his work is fundamentally different from magical realism:

Scientific rather than magical: In magical realism, the defining rule is that the magic is never explained, and supernatural events are treated with the same casual indifference as normal everyday occurrences. In contrast, Crouch's major hits—like Dark Matter, Recursion, and Upgrade—are rooted in speculative science and technology, exploring concepts like parallel universes, genetic engineering, and memory manipulation.

Different genre roots: Aside from his science fiction hits like the Wayward Pines trilogy, Crouch has a deep background in writing gritty serial killer thrillers, traditional psychological horror, and crime con-artist novellas.

Ultimately, while authors of magical realism use the unexplained to reflect on history, grief, or domestic life, Crouch uses technological and speculative sci-fi concepts to drive fast-paced thrillers.

So then I asked about myself. 

Question: Does Paul Ashlin fit in this group?

Yes, Paul Ashlin fits perfectly into this group, specifically within the modern branch of the genre known as contemporary magical realism or "domestic surrealism".

Unlike Blake Crouch, whose works are rooted in speculative science and technology, Ashlin's writing anchors high-concept, paranormal phenomena squarely inside the gritty, messy realities of a completely ordinary person's life. For example, his novel Sanctuary centers on Tom Thompson, a small-town Texas high school football coach whose life is already fracturing from mundane issues—like a struggling marriage and local town tension—before an unexplainable, cataclysmic event occurs.

Ashlin aligns closely with the magical realism tradition for several reasons:

Focus on domestic realism over sci-fi escalation: When extraordinary events happen in his stories, the narrative does not pivot into a massive sci-fi war. Instead, the story looks inward to focus on the intense psychological pressure, the struggle to adapt, and the very human reality that the protagonist just wants his normal, quiet life back.

Grounding the absurd in humanity: Even in the sequel, Sanctuary 2, which introduces a literal resurrection that brings the protagonist "Jesus and Elvis" levels of global fame, Ashlin handles the paranormal elements with a slow-burn skill that prioritizes snappy dialogue and the raw, "warts and all" humanity of the characters.

This approach of introducing the unexplainable into an average setting and focusing on how normal human relationships adapt to the absurd connects his work directly to other modern masters of the genre we discussed, such as Kevin Wilson.

My conclusion, it’s nice to have a home. Magical Realism, or Domestic Realism.