My name is Jonah Wisneski and I graduated from Hillsdale College where I received my Bachelor of Arts in English and History. I’ve lived in the metro Detroit area of Michigan my entire life. My love of literature began at an early age and continues to this day. My most prominent influences include H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Frank Herbert. In my fiction, I write in the fantasy, science fiction, horror, and thriller genres. I often explore darker themes because my goal is to make the reader think. I believe that fiction should have an important message or elicit a specific emotion, and sometimes that message or emotion can be dark or uncomfortable. Below are some of the stories that I consider to be my best and a short summary of each.
“Pan” is a work of interactive fiction that I wrote using twinery.org. “Pan” features multiple different branching storylines that blend genres together. My goal in writing “Pan” was to create a piece that could showcase my interactive fiction skills and my ability to write in different genres.
This piece is written in the screenplay style. It’s a rather short sample and left open ended to display my ability to write in the style of a video game.
“The Leviathan” was my first foray into cosmic horror. H.P. Lovecraft’s influence is most apparent in this short story, especially in the style. It’s a rather short story that describes the travels of a man who was transformed into a cosmic worm.
“Cernunnos” is my most overtly Lovecraftian story because I utilize one of Lovecraft’s own creations. Writing this story presented an interesting exercise in creating an unreliable narrator and comprehending the incomprehensible. The story depicts a Celtic hunter getting lost in a forest and encountering an eldritch horror that he mistakes for one of his gods.
My goal in writing “Ashley” was to tell a tragic story through milieu and as few words as possible. The result is a dark story about a mother grappling with the death of her daughter before accepting her ambiguous fate. This story is also posted on my blog, but I am including it in my writing portfolio because I believe it to be one of my best short stories.
“Wendigo” is a short story with elements of fantasy and horror. It’s inspired by my interests in mythology and folklore. It tells the story of a young girl’s metamorphosis into a monster after eating her father’s corpse to survive. The story provided me with another opportunity to develop ambiguous details that allow the story to be read and interpreted in different ways.
This entry is the excerpted “Prologue” to my novel Wasteland. Wasteland will be a five part post-apocalyptic epic that wrestles with philosophical questions about evil and gray morality. The “Prologue” introduces some of the questions about good and evil that reappear in the rest of the book. It also explains what created the apocalyptic wasteland.
This entry is the first three excerpted chapters in the first novel of a fantasy series I am writing. This novel follows the three young men Augustus, Constantine, and Jay as they oppose the orc Zemetrax and his forces who plan to resurrect four evil demon kings that they serve. This project is one of my longest, and it is the most inspired by Tolkien and his world.
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