Asher Black

Author / CEO

Asher Black is an author, musician, and karateka living the life he always dreamed of. Status = “I love my life.” He is an art collector, film enthusiast, and enthusiastic theater-goer who flirts shamelessly with ballroom dance, boating, hiking, languages, and other diverse interests.

Asher lives, works, reads, and thinks on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn, tells stories, works outside, and hosts a bevy of smoking pipes. His allies and friends are fiercely independent individuals who are extraordinarily clever and mutually loyal.

Asher grew up in rough circumstances and carved out who he is surrounded by rough trade. He has been hit by bats, hammers, bullwhips, ceramics, innumerable fists, and a number of cars. He's taken on predators, parasites, and bullies. He's faced down guns, machetes, torture, and knives. He's stood off gangs, mobs, and secret societies. But he's still here and some of them aren't. "We live by outlasting the dark," he says, "until we are the most formidable thing it contains."
Asher wrote poetry from age 15, started writing fiction in 2000, began taking it seriously in 2012, and in December 2021 began work on his first serious novel (slated for completion within one year) with another one planned immediately thereafter.

Asher's earliest interest in literature started with horror and he has spent some time hacking the genre, writing in a style he terms literary performance. Asher thinks of himself as an artist and storyteller and has always denied being a writer. While he currently writes in other genres, genre hacking those as well, horror still appeals to him as a fundamental crucible of human experience. Asher coined the term emo horror, or emotive horror, for horror lit that is primarily emotional but not merely atmospheric. A superb example is Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King.
Asher's Haunt™ is the expression of the four quests Asher says all human beings attempt: identity, understanding, meaning, and vocation, or else the single quest to answer four questions: Who am I? What is the world? What is my relation to the world? What do I do now? (Asher's 47th Maxim)