Hill is also an
American writer of
speculative fiction and mystery. He grew up in the Midwest but began writing under the influence of Southern California and has been linked by novelist/ essayist
Alan Rifkin to the tradition of "California fabulist literature." Hill has published three literary thrillers featuring Los Angeles cult investigator Stephan Raszer (Stee-vun Ray-zer), a tracker of missing persons and an expert in emerging religions in the present age of neo-
millennialism and
conspiracy theory. Raszer's preoccupation, as well as his author's, is in "what draws otherwise rational people to believe in unbelievable things...and act upon them." With his son, Nathanael, he authored a YA novel of speculative science-fiction entitled
The Switch, published in 2017 by Curiosity Quills Press. His latest novel is
Ministry, described by its author as a "post-apocalyptic romance," and was published in 2023 by TouchPoint Press.
Ministry depicts a world ravaged by environmental catastrophe and ruled over by a God-like AI whose fiercest adversary is a young woman charged by her father with restoring "the soul of the world." In 2003, Hill met Dorris Halsey, then 77, who became his agent. Halsey, who had been agent for
Aldous Huxley and
Henry Miller introduced the writer to those in her circle, including Dr.
Mani Lal Bhaumik, with whom Hill developed the memoir
Code Name God and for whom he edited a primer on cosmology,
The Cosmic Detective, and
Laura Huxley, with whom he briefly collaborated on a film adaptation of her late husband's novel,
The Island. Halsey died in 2006, and her protégé Kimberley Cameron now helms the renamed Kimberley Cameron Agency. He has also written feature articles for the
L.A. Weekly and short fiction for
Susie Bright's
Best American Erotica 2004 and the Absinthe Literary Review, which awarded him its Eros & Thanatos prize for
The Grotto. Hill is represented for motion picture projects by Steve Fisher at APA.
The Stephan Raszer Investigations Written in a
neo-noir style, the Raszer Investigations are described by their author as "boundary explorations" that track the sometimes precarious path between faith and fraud, and between genuine mystical experience and madness. Using the detective genre as a foil for his
metafiction, Hill employs his protagonist, Stephan Raszer, to probe a demimonde that oscillates between journalistic truth and high fantasy. Chandler scholar
Judith Freeman described Raszer in the
L.A. Weekly as "the thinking person's private eye" and
Nowhere-Land, the third in the series, as "maybe the first truly 21st-century mystery I've read." Hill's first novel, ''Enoch's Portal'', was loosely based on the exploits of the infamous
Order of the Solar Temple, a Franco-Swiss "suicide cult" that claimed the legacy of the
Knights Templar and fifty-three lives. It was initially published in hardcover in 2001. The book was read in manuscript by
Caldecott Chubb and then optioned by Paramount Pictures and assigned to director
Alex Proyas, who developed two scripts before abandoning it to make "I, Robot." Five years later, Hill followed with the second installment of the Stephan Raszer series,
The Last Days Of Madame Rey, a
tarot reading in the form of a mystery novel, or a mystery novel in the form of a tarot reading, with acknowledged literary debts to writers from
Jules Verne to
H. Rider Haggard to
Jorge Borges to
Wilhelm Reich. The third installment in the series arrived in June 2009 with
Nowhere-Land, a Sufi legend mapped out as a
role-playing game on the borderlands of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey in the imagined reality of a metastasizing Mideast war involving an
ISIS-like Islamist sect that traces its origins to
Hassan-i Sabbah's Cult of the Assassins. ''Nowhere-Land's'' panoramic and eerily prophetic cast of characters also involves members of the
Yezidi sect and Kurdish
peshmerga fighters, as well as the chimerical CIA agent Philby Greenstreet. == Bibliography ==