There’s a moment in every writer’s life story that explains everything that comes after — the hinge point where the person and the pen finally meet. For J.R. Larriba, that moment came not at a writing desk, but sitting bolt upright in bed one morning, hearing a voice as clear as any conversation he’d ever had.

“Son, I know you want to share Me with others in your storytelling, a gift that I gave you, but I want you to tell another story first. Your story.”

That’s how Remember the Prisoners: He Came to Set the Captives Free was born — a memoir that would go on to take third place in the Arizona Authors Association Literary Contest, and the first of three published works from a man who describes his own career path as “a multiplicity, like my genres.”

A Life Lived in Chapters

Before Larriba was writing books, he was living the kind of life most novelists only research. Soldier. Plumber. Small engine mechanic. Commercial truck driver — he still holds the CDL. These days, he works as a geologist’s assistant at a mine, under a boss he calls “like a father to me,” a comfort that carries extra weight since his own father has passed.

But the chapter that changed everything came after his military service, when a chip on his shoulder led him into addiction and, eventually, prison. “There, surrounded by brick, wire, and memory, I saw the worst and best of humanity,” he says. Among the murderers and con men, he also found Doyle Wayne Williams — a man Larriba now calls his father in Christ, and the reason he says he “stayed the course” in the years since. That redemption arc is the spine of his memoir, but its fingerprints are all over his fiction too.

From Faith to Fright — and Why That’s Not Really a Leap

Once what he calls the “burden of faith” of his memoir was satisfied, Larriba says his mind cleared for fiction — though he resists calling it a total departure. His horror debut, Itsy Bitsy Spyder: Evolution, the first installment of a planned trilogy, asks a haunting question: what if a father’s absence opens “a void of unparalleled retribution, where a good mother becomes time’s instrument of justice”?

The seeds were planted decades earlier, in bedtime stories his own father told — never neat, never resolved, always left open enough for a boy’s imagination to fill the gaps. That same instinct shapes Larriba’s process today. He calls himself a “pantser” — no outlines, no rigid plot mechanics, just “pure raw imagination let loose on the page.” It’s a method he credits partly to being diagnosed with ADHD as a child, a trait he says both fuels his creativity and derails him constantly, pulling him toward new works-in-progress before the current one is finished. He’s currently deep into book two of the trilogy, Mediums: Reliquary of Stillborn Gods.

His third book, What the Hands Remember: A Vignette Collection for the Times, began as something far humbler — writing exercises meant to teach himself concision. What emerged instead was his voice, fully formed, hiding in plain sight all along.

Writing for Readers Who Trust the Storm

Larriba doesn’t write for readers who want a tidy bow at the end. He writes for those who “trust the writer to give them what they came for, even if it means setting their own hair on fire in the process.” One Amazon reviewer put it succinctly, comparing his genre-blending horror to the work of Paul Tremblay, Laird Barron, and T. Kingfisher, and noting its “emotional cores and philosophical undertones.”

At fifty-nine, Larriba says age has given him something more valuable than confidence: the ability to actually hear criticism without shattering. “We hide behind and within the words and worlds of our own making,” he admits. “We want you to love us, because we are you, in all your humanity, warts and all.”

When he’s not writing, he’s hiking with Jennifer, his wife of fifteen years, who — by his account — endures his nonstop storytelling on the trail with a saintly “That’s really good, Hon!” He also paints, collects rocks and gems, and kayaks whenever the weather cooperates. All, he jokes, “expensive hobbies. Just ask Jennifer.”

Maybe that’s the truest thing about J.R. Larriba: a man who found the worst of humanity in a prison cell and came out the other side chasing light instead of running from the dark. His stories are full of fog-choked gulches and indifferent universes, but underneath the horror is a search — for meaning, for redemption, for a small tear in the cosmic dark wide enough to make a wish through. He’s still writing his way toward it, unruly and unoutlined, page after page — and asking his readers to come along, hair on fire and all.

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