Robert Brockway Books in Order

For punk horror with an ongoing story: The Unnoticeables → The Empty Ones → Kill All Angels
For weird cyberpunk first: Rx
For cosmic apocalypse: Carrier Wave
For dark horror with a big heart: I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200
For nonfiction doom, jokes included: Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

Robert Brockway was born in Los Angeles and moved to Oregon as a teenager. He has said he spent his teens and early twenties in Central Oregon, mostly around Redmond, with some time in Bend. That mix of big weird ideas and everyday, rough-edged life fits his books well. His stories are full of punks, drifters, workers, hustlers, and people who are very much not ready for the nightmare heading their way.

A lot of readers met him online before they ever found the books.

Before the novels, Brockway built his audience writing comedy and essays on the internet, especially through his long run at Cracked, where he became a senior editor and columnist. Earlier in his career, he also ran the humor site IFightRobots. That background still shows. Even when he writes horror, the sentences move fast, the jokes land hard, and the weirdest premise is usually anchored by somebody who sounds like a real person having a very bad day.

His first widely known book was Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, a nonfiction collection that turns real extinction risks, bad science, and human overconfidence into dark comedy. His first novel, Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, began as a self-published serial before being collected into one book. It throws readers into a drug-soaked cyberpunk future, and it already had many of Brockway's favorite tools, absurd humor, body horror, frantic momentum, and characters who keep going because stopping would be worse.

Then came the punk angels.

That would be The Unnoticeables, followed by The Empty Ones and Kill All Angels, the three books that make up The Vicious Circuit. The series jumps between the late 1970s punk scene and modern Los Angeles, following Carey, a bruised bar-fight philosopher, and Kaitlyn, an aspiring stuntwoman, as they collide with angels that are anything but holy. These books are loud, gross, funny, and surprisingly emotional. Readers who click with Brockway usually like that mix, the jokes, the speed, the gore, and the fact that the people at the center still feel human even when the world around them stops making sense.

He kept pushing bigger afterward. Carrier Wave turns a signal from space into a sprawling apocalypse, while I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 takes a premise that sounds like a dare and turns it into horror with real sadness underneath. He likes premises that sound ridiculous until the emotional damage underneath them starts to show. Across all of it, Brockway keeps circling similar concerns, isolation, damaged friendships, class pressure, bad systems, and the ways people build stories to survive fear. He likes cosmic menace, but he also likes rent money problems, cheap apartments, and the kind of gallows humor people use when life is not giving them better material.

He hasn't stayed only in books, either. Brockway is also a screenwriter, podcaster, and comedian, and he co-founded the comedy site 1900HOTDOG. He has co-hosted The Dogg Zzone 9000 and BIGFEETS, which fits neatly with the same sensibility you see in the fiction, curious, chaotic, and willing to chase a dumb idea until it becomes genuinely fascinating.

He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Meagan and their two dogs, Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh. If you like horror that can be filthy, funny, and unexpectedly tender in the same chapter, Brockway is probably worth your time.