Much of his writing satirizes the idiocy of pop culture and western society, illustrating how 'the reel increasingly usurps the real.' Taken as a whole, his writing is difficult to quantify and he has been said to defy categorization some critics have called him 'a genre in himself.' Publishers Weekly has described his fiction as 'testosterone-fueled and intentionally disorienting' which 'invokes not a dialogue with the reader but a bare-knuckle fistfight.'

He is also known for helping create and shape the aesthetics of bizarro fiction, which has been described as a 'mélange of elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque.' Many of his books are published by Raw Dog Screaming Press, a small press specializing in bizarro fiction. Identity, described by Booklist as a 'madcap, macabre black comedy,' and the subsequent Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance, both of which he has fancifully categorized as examples of 'splattershtick,' a literary, comic, ultraviolent form of metafiction. He has since published more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. Wilson began writing fiction in his early twenties when he took a creative writing course with novelist Patricia Powell while enrolled in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Identity, the two-volume short story collection Battle without Honor or Humanity, a monograph on John Carpenter’s They Live and a critical study of the life and work of J. His body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary theory with various genres of speculative fiction, with Wilson also being recognized as one of the co-founders of bizarro fiction.' Among his books is the award-winning novel Dr.

Harlan Wilson (born September 3, 1971) is an American novelist, short-story writer, critic, playwright and English professor.

They Live by D. Harlan Wilson