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This article is part of\u00a0<\/i>Upstream,<\/i><\/a>\u00a0The Daily Wire\u2019s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories \u2014 from our featured writers to you.<\/i><\/p>\n ***<\/i><\/p>\n Last year 40% of Americans didn\u2019t read<\/a> a single book. Print book sales are rising, but not necessarily in any return to tradition; a printed book is a useful prop that can be held up to the camera for TikTok. Responding to ever greater challenges, the publishing industry is nevertheless a lot more ideologically homogenous than it used to be, and it doesn\u2019t much care about you or me.<\/p>\n But who\u2019s black-pilling<\/a>? We still love books, and we\u2019re not giving up. Every day, new authors and publishers are turning out books for varying kinds of right-of-center audiences. It\u2019s hard to stand out in an ocean of content, though, given that conservative outlets notorious for grousing about the culture never review right-wing authors\u2019 contributions to it \u2014 until now.<\/p>\n So, here are three thrillers by authors who don\u2019t hate us.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerican Paladin\u201d<\/a> by Larry Correia<\/strong><\/p>\n Larry Correia is underreviewed and complains about it, which sounds like egotism until you remember the man has sold so many books that he has literally purchased a mountain. Correia is best known for his flagship series \u201cMonster Hunter: International,\u201d wherein private contractors fight monsters and make money off of government bounties. Like many War on Terror-era thrillers, its hero is well-funded and aided by powerful individuals and organizations. Women fantasize about well-off romantic interests desperately attracted to them; men fantasize about well-paid, cool jobs that buy them guns.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerican Paladin\u201d goes the opposite way. Nick Spears is poor, inexpert, and unlucky. For years, he\u2019s been desperately trying to hunt the supernatural, but it isn\u2019t biting. When he was a teenager, he and his loved ones unknowingly wandered across the veil between worlds. Only Nick survived to make it home. Now the monsters and unholy cultists that are the subject of his desired revenge stubbornly refuse to show up. As consolation, he\u2019s turned vigilante to hunt human predators instead.<\/p>\n When a podcaster\u2019s unwelcome attention threatens to draw attention to his work,\u00a0Nick finds the podcaster in the crosshairs of the other side he\u2019s hunted all these years. Now the two of them are running and gunning for their lives against the enemy Nick has sought all his life.<\/p>\n Correia is always dependable at delivering action, but the real pleasure here is the setting. \u201cAmerican Paladin\u201d offers a refreshing world of elusive cryptids, mysterious lands, and conspiracy-minded schizos trying to make sense of it all. Its magic and monsters feel genuinely eerie, and its hero stands out by being capable but entirely uncredentialed. Nick Spears has no cool resume; he never finished high school, never went to war, and at one point in the book encounters a gun he is unable to identify immediately. Fans of cryptid lore should get a kick out of this working hero in America\u2019s lonely places. Nick Spears belongs on the weird adventure shelf beside F. Paul Wilson\u2019s Repairman Jack.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerican Apocalypse: The Second American Civil War\u201d<\/a> by Kurt Schlichter<\/strong><\/p>\n There are an awful lot of right-wing books about American civil wars and their aftermaths. Most of them are heavy on red meat and bluster, Kurt Schlichter\u2019s own Kelly Turnbull series included. So it\u2019s an unexpected and interesting choice to see Schlichter consciously imitate Studs Terkel and fictional treatments such as Max Brooks\u2019s \u201cWorld War Z\u201d to recount an American Civil War from a mostly ant\u2019s-eye view, in the form of first-person reminiscences from a variety of participants.<\/p>\n Some of these are more effective than others. Like most right-of-center authors, Schlichter isn\u2019t any more convincing writing leftists than lefty writers are at writing conservatives. A widowed mother trying to survive, a cold-blooded hitman who wanted the war to keep going because he loved doing targeted killings, and unreconstructed leftists in exile all speak with the same voice. Worse, they\u2019re all covering a similar general arc. While Schlichter divides his book into three sections covering different periods of the war, in practice each individual tells their whole story of the war from beginning to end. It gets a little redundant.<\/p>\n Unlike a lot of right-wing civil war fiction, though, \u201cAmerican Apocalypse\u201d is realistic enough to draw a portrait of a brutish war that\u2019s far from the easy victory you frequently see braggadocious right-wingers assume on social media. Spoiler: Team Right wins, but it\u2019s extremely ugly and the result winds up being American Francoism<\/a>, which also makes the book notable as a yardstick of sentiment of the right-of-center type that doesn\u2019t want American Francoism and wouldn\u2019t advocate for it but might be willing to live under it if they didn\u2019t have to shoulder any moral responsibility for it.<\/p>\n A lot of right-wing authors cover similar subject matter, but none with Kurt Schlichter\u2019s out-of-the-box approach. It doesn\u2019t succeed as well as it might have, but it\u2019s encouraging to see the effort.<\/p>\n