Richard Daniels

Richard Daniels Has Arrived. And He’s Brought Something Odd.

Richard Daniels captured attention with his debut Earth: A Beginner’s Guide to Unwitching. It's a strange, dryly funny, quietly magical novel that plays with fantasy tropes by politely refusing to follow any of them.

There are no epic quests here. No chosen ones. No world-ending threats. Instead, Daniels builds a world where magic is tangled up in paperwork, rituals are deeply inconvenient, and the rules of unwitching are just as bureaucratic as anything else. The tone is calm, but the unease is constant. His world feels lived-in and slightly askew, like a fairy tale that wandered too far into real life and forgot how to get back.

Daniels writes with sharp restraint. The prose is spare, deliberate, and lightly unsettling. Beneath the dry humor, something quietly uncanny pulses. You don’t always notice when a scene shifts from funny to eerie. Then suddenly, you’re somewhere you didn’t expect to be.

What makes Earth to Earth stand out isn’t just its oddness. It’s the confidence. Daniels trusts his readers to find the tension inside the silences, to accept that not every question gets an answer, and that sometimes the most unsettling magic is the kind that feels almost plausible.

In a genre full of noise, Daniels brings stillness. And just enough unease to keep you from ever feeling fully comfortable.

It’s a debut that doesn’t just demand attention. It earns it.

Earth To Earth: A Beginner's Guide To Unwitching