About J. Richard Steele

J. Richard Steele’s work lives in the strange and the sharp—equal parts surreal satire and emotional gravity. His stories veer between the absurd and the unsettling, the laugh-out-loud and the quietly haunted. Through decades of creative discipline, he’s forged a voice that’s both stylistically daring and deeply human—and he’s now seeking publication with renewed focus and fire.

On one hand, Steele writes fiction that twists and stings: surreal, satirical, and off-kilter stories that prod the modern world with a crooked grin. This edge of his writing carries forward the spirit of his ancestor and namesake, Sir Richard Steele—the 18th-century Irish writer, essayist, and co-founder of The Spectator, known for blending wit, moral reflection, and social critique. That lineage of sharp observation and literary experimentation echoes through Steele’s modern-day work, now filtered through a darker, stranger lens.

On the other, he ventures into more haunted terrain: stories born of grief and strangeness, of horror that creeps in sideways. These are tales of emotional weight and eerie resonance, rooted in raw experience, haunted atmospheres, and mythic echoes.

His fiction takes many forms: short stories, story collections, graphic novel scripts, one-page comics, philosophical fragments, and literary experiments that blend modes and genres. Whether comic or chilling, lyrical or deranged, every piece invites the reader into a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems—and something always flickers beneath the surface.

This site offers a window into both sides of J. Richard Steele’s literary mind:

Where myth, madness, and meaning collide.