By: Miles Grant

What happens when the classic Hero’s Journey—a tale we’ve been taught to revere—is turned inside out? For Ben “Doc” Askins, former war medic, psychedelic guide, and now the incendiary voice behind Anti-Hero’s Journey, the answer is both simple and devastating: you burn it all down.

In his raw, unflinching, and darkly humorous new book, Askins introduces readers to the Zeromyth—a complete inversion of Joseph Campbell’s famed Monomyth. Where Campbell saw a universal pattern in mythic tales across cultures, Askins sees a dangerously inflated ego trip. “The Hero’s Journey pumps the ego full of helium and launches it toward ‘purpose’ like a birthday balloon,” Askins explains. “The Zeromyth is the slow hiss of that air escaping until all that’s left is the deflated rubber you thought you were.”

His goal? Not to uplift, but to unmake. Not to help you find yourself, but to annihilate the illusions that have kept you trapped.

The Death of the Self as Salvation

For Askins, this is personal. After years serving as a medic in military war zones—patching up bodies in the sand and later helping veterans deal with the psychic aftermath—he came to a brutal realization: the identity we cling to is the source of our suffering.

“Personal identity and ego are the root of all suffering,” he says. “No ego to defend, no suffering to feel or inflict.” In a world built on what he calls “the theater of separate selves,” Askins positions Anti-Hero’s Journey as a Molotov cocktail thrown into the dressing room mirror. “If you’re lucky, it’ll explode what you think you are too.”

In the wake of war, loss, and spiritual detonation, Askins found something most books tiptoe around: liberation not in self-discovery, but in self-erasure. “Being ‘someone’ damn near killed me,” he confesses. “Being no one? That saved my life.”

Is This a Spiritual Book or an Attack on Spirituality?

“Yes,” Askins grins through the page. Anti-Hero’s Journey is a paradox on purpose. It reads like a fistfight in a church and a eulogy with punchlines. Askins offers no dogma, no salvation—only the sharp tools to dismantle both.

“This book doesn’t promise salvation, but it might resurrect you—by forcing you to believe nothing, so you can choose something real,” he says. It’s a spiritual confrontation, not a spiritual guidebook. The divine and the profane get equal airtime. “Everything’s sacred and everything’s nonsense. War taught me that both can be true.”

How It Feels to Read This Book

Anti-Hero’s Journey isn’t a gentle read—it’s more like an emotional demolition site. Expect psychic vertigo, dark humor, and unexpected grace in the rubble. Askins wants readers to feel “disoriented. Seen. Punched in the psyche. Then suddenly, disturbingly free.”

This isn’t trauma exploitation or poetic suffering for suffering’s sake. Rather, Askins delivers a controlled detonation—of ego, belief, and identity—so that something truer might emerge. “You’ll feel unsettled. Unlocked. Undefended. Unapologetically human.”

Who Should Avoid This Book?

Askins doesn’t mince words: this book is not for everyone. “People who like being lied to. People who think trauma is a personality trait. People whose Amazon cart is full of crystals, vision boards, and ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ decals.” He’s not here to coddle. His book contains graphic depictions of war, PTSD, and emotional reckoning. There’s no patriotic framing, no sugarcoated redemption.

“This isn’t about heroism or patriotism—it’s about human wreckage and how we attempt to rebuild it.”

So Why Read It?

Because sometimes, the only way forward is through a blaze.

“I’m not selling nihilism—I’m offering a wrecking ball to the shaky scaffolding you’ve built your life on,” Askins writes. Anti-Hero’s Journey doesn’t hand you answers. It offers tougher questions, brutal clarity, and the liberating possibility that the self you’ve been desperately trying to protect never existed in the first place.

Askins doesn’t want to change you. He wants to strip away everything that thinks it can be changed. What’s left is terrifying… and absolutely free.

In a literary landscape saturated with self-help platitudes and safe personal development narratives, Anti-Hero’s Journey is a dangerous, necessary book. For those willing to walk through the fire, it doesn’t promise transformation. It promises truth.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s what will finally set you free.