Jackson Dean Chase’s work has always drawn from more than one shelf.

His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry reflect a mix of counterculture writing, hardboiled crime, noir, fantasy, historical fiction, horror, post-apocalyptic fiction, and coming-of-age stories. Some of those influences map directly onto genres he has written. Others show up more indirectly—in voice, pacing, atmosphere, characterization, moral ambiguity, or the willingness to blend categories that are usually kept separate.

That cross-pollination matters. A dystopian or urban fantasy story can still borrow the fatalism of noir, the immediacy of coming-of-age fiction, the brutality of horror, the sweep of historical fiction, or the emotional directness of poetry.

The result is less a set of isolated genre influences than a shared creative vocabulary.

Action / Adventure / Mystery / Thriller

Jackson’s action, adventure, mystery, and thriller influences reinforce many of the qualities that also appear in his noir, horror, and speculative fiction: momentum, danger, pressure, pursuit, escalation, and protagonists forced to act before they have complete information.

Ralph Dennis and James Moseley bring crime and mystery structure into the mix, while James Dickey and Castle Freeman show how stripped-down narratives can generate enormous tension from relatively simple premises. Warren S. Murphy, Richard Sapir, Don Pendleton, Chuck Dixon, and the other writers associated with long-running action series demonstrate the value of pace, recurring protagonists, efficient characterization, and stories built to keep moving.

These influences matter even when Jackson is not writing a conventional thriller. Their DNA appears in chase structures, escalating complications, violent reversals, compressed timelines, and the tendency to treat plot as something that should exert continual pressure on the characters.

Jackson's influences and inspirations:

• Ralph Dennis (Hardman series)
• James Dickey (Deliverance)
• Castle Freeman (Go With Me)
• James Moseley (Devil In a Blue Dress, Fear Itself, Fearless Jones)
• Warren S. Murphy and Richard Sapir (The Destroyer series)
• Don Pendleton, Chuck Dixon, and others (The Executioner/Mack Bolan series)

Counterculture/Poetry

Jackson’s poetry and much of his prose are shaped by writers who favored immediacy, candor, compression, and a willingness to write directly from lived experience.

Charles Bukowski is an obvious influence in the plainspoken intensity, dark humor, emotional exposure, and focus on outsiders and damaged people. Leonard Cohen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped reinforce the idea that poetry could be literary without becoming remote or overworked. Jack Kerouac’s spontaneity and movement, Jim Morrison’s surreal and mythic imagery, Frank Stanford’s dreamlike intensity, and Rudolph Wurlitzer’s stripped-down countercultural fiction all contributed to Jackson’s preference for work that feels alive, direct, and slightly dangerous.

These influences do not stay confined to poetry. They also surface in fiction through rhythm, voice, character interiority, and the preference for emotional truth over polish for its own sake.

Jackson's influences and inspirations:

• Charles Bukowski (Factotum, Ham on Rye, Love Is a Dog from Hell, Post Office, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Women)
• Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind)
• Jack Kerouac (Book of Haikus, On the Road)
• Jim Morrison (The Lords and The New Creatures)
• Frank Stanford (What About This?)
• Rudolph Wurlitzer (Nog, Quake)

Fantasy/Historical

Jackson’s fantasy influences tend toward dangerous worlds, morally compromised characters, hard choices, and lived-in settings rather than clean heroic abstraction.

Joe Abercrombie, George R. R. Martin, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Chris Bunch, and the Thieves’ World writers all reinforced the appeal of fantasy grounded in violence, politics, survival, personality, and consequence. Leigh Bardugo added another model for character-driven fantasy with strong emotional and coming-of-age elements.

Historical novelists such as Bernard Cornwell, Ken Follett, Manda Scott, and Louis L’Amour also shaped Jackson’s sense of place, momentum, material detail, and conflict. Even when writing secondary-world or speculative fiction, that historical influence encourages settings that feel occupied, contested, and shaped by culture rather than merely decorated.

Those strands come together especially clearly in work like The Gods War, where dystopian, urban fantasy, mythic, and young-adult elements can coexist without needing to belong to only one genre tradition.

Jackson's influences and inspirations:

• Joe Abercrombie (Best Served Cold, The First Law Trilogy, Sharp Ends)
• Robert Lynn Asprin, Lynn Abbey, and others (Thieves' World, Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn, Shadows Over Sanctuary)
• Leigh Bardugo (The Grisha Trilogy)
• Chris Bunch (The Seer King Trilogy)
• Bernard Cornwell (A Crowning Mercy, The Gallows Thief, The Saxon Chronicles, Stonehenge)
• Ken Follett (Pillars of the Earth, World Without End)
• Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian, Kull, Solomon Kane)
• Louis L'Amour (Fair Blows the Wind, The Walking Drum)
• Fritz Lieber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series)
• George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire series)
• John Maddox Roberts (Conan the Rogue)
• Manda Scott (The Boudica Trilogy)

Hardboiled/Noir

Hardboiled and noir fiction are among Jackson’s strongest and most persistent prose influences.

Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett supplied the foundations: lean movement, sharp dialogue, damaged characters, corrupt systems, and protagonists forced to navigate morally compromised worlds. Writers such as David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Gil Brewer, Charles Willeford, James M. Cain, Elliott Chaze, Charles Williams, and Robert Edmond Alter pushed those qualities into darker, stranger, and more psychologically unstable territory.

James Ellroy contributed density, momentum, corruption, violence, and moral extremity. Mickey Spillane and Norvell Page reinforced the appeal of pulp velocity and decisive action. John Fante contributed a different but related influence: wounded interiority, desperation, ego, and self-exposure.

Jackson has not treated noir as a box to stay inside. Its influence appears across genres—in protagonists under pressure, clipped dialogue, moral ambiguity, fatalism, criminal or corrupt environments, and stories that move forward because characters are forced to make decisions before they are ready.

Jackson's influences and inspirations:

• Robert Edmond Alter (Swamp Sister)
• Gil Brewer (13 French Street, A Taste for Sin, The Three-Way Split, The Vengeful Virgin)
• James M. Cain (The Cocktail Waitress, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice)
• Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, Trouble Is My Business)
• Elliott Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel)
• James Ellroy (American Tabloid, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, Killer On the Road)
• John Fante (Ask the Dust)
• David Goodis (Black Friday, The Burglar, Cassidy's Girl, Shoot the Piano Player, Street of No Return)
• Dashiell Hammett (The Continental Op series, The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest)
• Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge (The Spider novels)
• Mickey Spillane (the Mike Hammer novels)
• Jim Thompson (The Criminal, The Getaway, The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me, The Kill-Off, Pop. 1280, Savage Night)
• Charles Willeford (The Black Mass of Brother Springer, Miami Blues, Sideswipe, The Woman Chaser)
• Charles Williams (Dead Calm, The Hot Spot, A Touch of Death)

Horror/Post-Apocalyptic

Jackson’s horror influences helped shape his use of menace, escalation, grotesque imagery, isolation, and the sense that ordinary reality can break open without warning.

Stephen King and Richard Matheson demonstrated how horror could remain character-driven and emotionally accessible while still becoming frightening or fantastic. Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, Hugh B. Cave, H.P. Lovecraft, and Frederick C. Davis contributed pulp energy, strange threats, psychological unease, and cosmic or supernatural dread.

Shaun Hutson, Edward Levy, Brian Lumley, and Robert Edmond Alter pushed the influence toward more visceral horror, physical danger, monsters, transformation, and survival.

The post-apocalyptic side of that influence is equally important. Jackson is drawn to stories that strip away normal structures and force characters to reveal who they are under pressure. That sensibility carries into dystopian fiction, fantasy, and even TTRPG design, where environments and threats are most useful when they create decisions rather than merely scenery.

Jackson's primary influences and inspirations:

• Robert Edmond Alter (Pathway to Savagery)
• Charles Beaumont (short stories)
• Robert Bloch (Mysteries of the Worm, Psycho)
• Hugh B. Cave (Death Stalks the Night, Murgunstrumm and Others)
• Frederick C. Davis (The Mole Men Want Your Eyes)
• Shaun Hutson (Breeding Ground, Erebus, Slugs, Spawn)
• Stephen King (Different Seasons, Night Shift, 'Salem's Lot, Pet Semetary, The Shining)
• Edward Levy (The Beast Within)
• H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos short stories)
• Brian Lumley (Necroscope series, Vampire World series)
• Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, short stories)

Young Adult/Coming of Age

Jackson’s young-adult and coming-of-age influences are less about writing “for teenagers” than about writing characters at the point where identity, danger, love, loyalty, power, and consequence are becoming impossible to avoid.

S.E. Hinton, J.D. Salinger, Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, Megan Abbott, Courtney Summers, and Elizabeth Scott all demonstrate different ways of taking young characters seriously without softening the emotional stakes. Their work helped reinforce Jackson’s tendency to treat teenage protagonists as full dramatic characters rather than simplified versions of adults.

Leigh Bardugo, Veronica Roth, Lauren Oliver, and Lauren DeStefano added speculative and dystopian frameworks in which coming-of-age pressures become inseparable from larger political or supernatural conflicts. Dan Simmons brought horror, memory, friendship, and adolescence together on a broader canvas, while Go Ask Alice reflects the raw confessional mode that also connects back to Jackson’s counterculture and autobiographical influences.

These influences are especially visible in Jackson’s crossover work, where young protagonists often inhabit stories that are structurally and emotionally closer to adult fiction than conventional YA.

Jackson's influences and inspirations:

• Anonymous (Go Ask Alice)
• Megan Abbott (Dare Me, The End of Everything, Queenpin)
• Leigh Bardugo (The Grisha Trilogy)
• Lauren DeStefano (The Chemical Garden Trilogy)
• S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)
• Stephen King (Apt Pupil, The Body)
• Robert R. McCammon (A Boy's Life)
• Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
• Veronica Roth (Divergent, Insurgent)
• J.D. Salinger (The Catcher In the Rye)
• Dan Simmons (Summer of Night)
• Elizabeth Scott (The Living Dead Girl)
• Courtney Summers (Cracked Up to Be, Some Girls Are, This Is Not a Test)

Writing/Editing

Reading fiction taught Jackson what stories could do. Studying craft taught him how to understand why they worked.

These are among the books that helped sharpen the technical side of his writing: plotting, scene construction, revision, short-fiction structure, pacing, character development, and self-editing.

James Scott Bell provided practical structural tools for plot and revision. Rennie Browne and Dave King helped refine line-level and scene-level editing instincts. Damon Knight was especially important in understanding the compression and precision required by short fiction. Raymond Obstfeld contributed practical approaches to scenes and story repair, while Jeffrey Alan Schechter offered a highly structured way of thinking about story progression.

But formal craft books were only part of the education. Comics and horror magazines such as Creepy, Tales from the Crypt, and Weird Science were equally important teachers of short-form storytelling. Their stories had to establish character and conflict quickly, escalate efficiently, and often deliver a memorable final reversal or shock ending within a limited number of pages.

Jackson's favorite books on writing craft:

• James Scott Bell (Plot & Structure, Revision & Editing)
• Rennie Browne and Dave King (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers)
• Damon Knight (Creating Short Fiction)
• Raymond Obstfeld (Fiction First Aid, Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes)
• Jeffrey Alan Schechter (My Story Can Beat Up Your Story)

If you buy My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, be sure to download the free bonus chapter on mirroring from the author's website.

Short Fiction, Poetry, and the Novel

Jackson’s early work in poetry and short fiction also shaped the way he later approached novels.

He believes short-story writers often have an advantage when moving into longer fiction because they have already learned compression: how to enter a story quickly, eliminate unnecessary material, make individual scenes carry more weight, and create endings that land.

The same principle applies to poetry. Poetry teaches economy, rhythm, image, voice, and the weight of individual words. Those skills transfer naturally into prose.

James Dickey is a useful example. Before writing Deliverance, one of the most literary survival thrillers in American fiction, Dickey was already an accomplished poet. That combination of poetic control and narrative brutality is part of what gives the novel its distinctive power.

Jackson’s own path followed a similar principle in a broader sense. Developing as both a poet and short-fiction writer before concentrating more heavily on novels gave him tools that continued to shape his longer work: compression, pacing, imagery, voice, and an instinct for making scenes earn their space.

Blending the Shelves

Jackson’s strongest influences do not stay neatly separated by genre—or even by medium.

Noir can shape fantasy. Poetry can shape prose rhythm. Horror can sharpen a coming-of-age story. Historical fiction can make an invented world feel more tangible. Action fiction can teach momentum. Short stories can teach compression. Comics can teach pacing and endings. Craft books can turn instinct into repeatable technique.

That blending is central to the work.

Rather than writing toward a single genre template, Jackson tends to pull whatever is useful from the traditions that shaped him and recombine them around the story at hand.

The categories above are therefore less a map of separate lanes than a map of the materials he keeps returning to.

TTRPG Game Design

Jackson’s tabletop roleplaying game design draws on many of the same principles that shape his fiction: strong atmosphere, internal logic, meaningful choices, dangerous worlds, and respect for the audience’s intelligence. His TTRPG influences range from Gary Gygax and N. Robin Crossby to Monte Cook, Kevin Crawford, and modern GM-focused designers.

• Read Jackson's TTRPG Influences & Inspirations
• Visit MageGate Games

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