By: Elowen Gray
- L. Eminhizer laughs when he says he is just “upright and sucking air.” The self-deprecating humor masks something: his debut novel, which is as ambitious as it is sprawling. Chronicles of a Lost King – Chapter One takes readers into a world of fantasy. A place where a desperate queen’s summoning spell plucks a battle-hardened wanderer from another world into her palace—and ends on a cliffhanger sharp enough to draw blood. The mix of court intrigue, survivalism, and cross-cultural humor has earned the book a spotlight in the New York Weekly. There, Eminhizer’s raw, coffee-fueled candor proved just as memorable as his prose.
When asked what pushed him toward writing a full novel, Eminhizer credits a casual dare from his teenage daughter. She knew that he scribbled stray poems and fragments, so she challenged him to finish an entire story during his downtime as an over-the-road trucker. “I used to run 18-wheelers,” he recalls. “When I was waiting at a dock or shutting down for my ten-hour break after arguing with people on the highway for eleven hours, the book just… grew.”
That origin explains the novel’s pacing. Whispered conspiracies in candlelit halls give way to ambushes in fog-thick forests. “I started with ‘What if?’—then threw out half the rules,” Eminhizer says. The result? A world that feels medieval and unexpected, with a bit of comic book love and a pinch of late-night anime.
Chronicles revolves around a magical ritual gone spectacularly wrong. Arianna, orphaned young and hemmed in by rivals, performs an ancient rite and summons a partner. What she gets is Sam—a monk-mercenary whose skills are decades outdated in his own world but centuries ahead of hers. “If we’re going to have magic,” Eminhizer remarks, “why not go for infinite possibilities?”
Sam is the fascination of the author with the layered strength. Eminhizer wanted a hero capable of compassion as well as combat. “Strength isn’t always about muscles,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s just sitting there quietly, staying small in the grand scheme.” That ethos shines in a moment where Sam, fresh from fending off assassins, spends an afternoon teaching village children to juggle. That is balance.
One of the book’s most charming surprises and interesting aspects is the language barrier between Sam and Arianna. The idea came from a real-life episode when Eminhizer helped a lost Russian trucker make it through a vast steel mill using a mashup of English, Spanish, and hand gestures. On the page, the miscommunication becomes both comic relief and a way to deepen trust.
The writing is unique in more ways than one, and the author discusses how the writing process was anything but traditional. For eight years, Eminhizer tapped out scenes on a sticky-note app during breaks, emailing fragments to himself for later assembly. “Some weeks I managed one sentence in five days, other times half a page in an hour,” he says. The draft eventually ballooned to 1,500 pages before he learned Amazon prefers under 500. Cutting it down, he jokes, was like “reorganizing backwards chaos,” but it sharpened the book’s propulsive voice.
Though the book deals with multiple complex themes such as destiny, culture clash, and perseverance, Eminhizer insists the core message is hope. “Anything is possible if you’re willing to try,” he says. And that very spirit you see embodied in Havoc, the puppy Sam rescues and names for the trouble he causes. The dog’s loyalty becomes an anchor in a treacherous world.
Early reactions have been as colorful as the book itself. Eminhizer’s mother proudly tells everyone she meets. Truck-stop friends rib him about thinly disguised versions of themselves in his pages. One buddy texted him a screenshot of a brutal fight scene, asking, “Were you drunk when you wrote this?” Eminhizer admits he wrote it in a dispatch office between deliveries—a reminder that creativity is often an endurance sport.
Eugene L. Eminhizer grew up in a house steeped in stories. His father, a college professor and minister, and his mother, a teacher, gave him equal parts logic and empathy. Those were the qualities that you see in his fiction. Before becoming a full-time writer, Eminhizer spent years as a farmer, a construction worker, and a trucker. This real world’s drudgery grounds his world of fantasy into something tangible.
Sequels aren’t a question but a certainty. Chapters Two and Three are already with the publisher, and Eminhizer has seven more drafts waiting in the wings. Future books will send Sam across worlds again, introduce non-human allies, and upend the magical rulebook yet again. “All the rules are going to change,” he teases, with a grin in his voice.
When asked what he hopes to bring to modern fantasy, Eminhizer keeps it simple. “I just want to add to it. To show that under the right circumstances, anything is possible.” For readers, the message may feel even simpler: slow down, find something to laugh about, and hold fast to what—and who—you love.
That philosophy, born in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler and hammered into high adventure, is reason enough to follow wherever E. L. Eminhizer takes us next.
