Luke Dumas Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Luke Dumas is a horror fiction novelist who was born and raised in San Diego, California.

As a teen, he went to the University of Chicago for his bachelor’s degree and then to the University of Edinburgh, where he got his creative writing master’s degree.
His nonfiction works have been featured in “Last Exit,” “Nature,” “Palace,” “Hobart,” and “The Whole Alphabet,” the queer anthology among others.
He published “A History of Fear,” his debut novel in 2022, and followed that up with “The Paleontologist” in 2023.

Luke has also been employed in nonprofits for more than a decade with organizations such as the American Red Cross and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
He currently makes his home in San Diego, where he lives with his husband and their dogs.

Similar to many middle and lower-class white men, privilege has always been a thorny issue for Luke Dumas.

This was particularly true when he was doing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago, where he got a need-based scholarship and had to study with well-heeled classmates which made him feel underprivileged.
Even though it has been a long time since he went to college, he still carries loans from his student days where he used to make do with a crappy Windows machine that broke every semester while his peers had shiny white Macbooks.
In his freshman year, he joined the university paper and worked with a columnist who was the son of a very famous literary fiction author. His colleague would soon sell his first novel to Penguin, which made him very jealous.
This was made worse by the fact that his manuscript which he wrote while working as a camp counselor during the summer was rejected by every agent. All he wanted was to become a published author but nothing he did seemed to work.

Luke Dumas’ experiences from his time in college lingered and colored how he viewed himself and made it harder for him to see himself as he ought to.

He used to think that if he was so privileged, he would have gotten published in his teenage years and interned at Esquire and Random House like most of the English majors in his year.
Luke used to believe that if he had privilege, he would have been making six figures employed in corporate communications and not working in nonprofits.

It never occurred to him how much privilege he had to be born to a single mother who was a grant writer earning $42,000 a year.

While drafting his novel, his perspective started to change and he began thinking that if his mother did not work for the Red Cross, the opportunity to intern there would never have been available to him.
Without the experience, he would never have been hired by the third-rate law school where he honed his skills. Moreover, he does not think he would have been so bold to constantly seek promotions, new roles, and raises and get them as he did.

The first ever novel that Luke Dumas ever penned was a tragic memoir of unrequired gay love which he wrote while he was 17.

He would then follow that with three misses that included two adult comedies and a dark middle-grade fantasy which went nowhere.

For years, he thought of himself as a writer of witty and humorous works and hence “A History of Fear,” which was the fourth novel he wrote was something of a departure that made him pleasantly surprised at how easily mystery and murder came to him.
He was lucky that he knew an agent whom he went to school with at the University of Edinburgh.

When he began querying agents, he reached out to her after nearly a decade of not speaking, feeling embarrassed and cringey, and fully expecting to be shut down.
But to his surprise, Maria loved his manuscript and made an offer to represent him which he jumped at. A few years after signing on with her, he sold the rights to his first novel.

“A History of Fear” by Luke Dumas is a fascinating work that tells the story of the most famous killer in Scotland, named Grayson Hale, even though he sometimes goes by his nickname “The Devil’s Advocate.”
He is a grad student who became notorious when he said that he killed Liam Stewart his classmate and claimed that the Devil made him do it.

When the man is discovered hanging in his cell, officers stumble upon a handwritten manuscript that could answer a question that the nation had for years. Was Hale telling the truth all along or was he a lunatic?
At the opening of the story, we are introduced to a newly enrolled student at the University of Edinburgh who is also an acerbic young atheist. He had joined the university to continue with the work of his father who is recently deceased.
Needing money, he takes an offer from a dark stranger to become a ghostwriter for a mysterious novel.

However, he has concerns when the project starts to awaken a rare condition named satanophobia, which makes him believe the Devil is after him, resulting in him living in terror.
Struggling to disentangle fear from fact, Grayson finds his world upended and the happenings force him to deal with a growing suspicion that he may just be working for the devil.

Luke Dumas’ novel “The Paleontologist” tells the story of Dr. Simon Nealy, a curator of paleontology. He never imagined he would return to his hometown in Pennsylvania let alone the Natural History Museum in Hawthorne.
He was just a boy when Morgan his six-year-old sister was taken from under his watch while they were at the museum.

Nealy has been haunted by guilt since that day. However, following the death of the aunt who brought him up and a harrowing breakup, he is drawn back home.

But from the moment he landed, he found things were very different. The museum which is crumbling is plummeting toward catastrophe and remains shut amid a biting pandemic.

Even worse, he is hearing and seeing things he cannot explain and he fears that he is losing his hold on reality. Looking through the research diaries left by his predecessor he stumbles upon a blood-soaked mystery.
It is a mystery that has been kept hidden for 150 million years that if resolved could answer everything he needs to know.