Fiction

As a writer, Christopher Deliso’s favored and most natural form of creative expression has always been in the form of fiction.

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Although representing a tiny proportion of the author’s published works (as of 2023), Christopher Deliso has  since an early age been enthusiastically engaged in the reading and writing of fiction in various genres, and his eternal love of fiction remains his prime motivation as a writer today.

Readers can visit the relevant drop-down pages here for more information on Christopher Deliso’s past, present and future fiction projects. These range from flash fiction, short stories and experimental works to novellas and multi-part series. Much more information will be provided as it becomes available, and new stories may also be uploaded to the website in the relevant sub-pages, so do check in periodically to see what has been updated.

For those readers interested to get a better understanding of Christopher Deliso’s fictional preferences, knowing something of the author’s literary influences might prove useful.

Thus, first of all, as a small child, he was enthralled by the stories of the small creatures that inhabited the forests close to his own, in the tales of Thornton Burgess. And then, as he developed an interest in history, various anonymous (and probably, mostly apocryphal) biographies of early American explorers and heroes like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Francis Marion (‘The Swamp Fox’ of the Revolution) captivated his mind. And he read with great attention all of the Hardy Boys mysteries, with their dependable bygone charm and (for a child, at least) unexpected twists that kept him turning the pages as the mysteries developed.

As he grew older, Christopher Deliso found that he continued to gravitate towards certain authors naturally, and among these the strongest connection was with another local native of his state, Jack Kerouac. Another writer whose works he read with great attention and admiration was James Joyce. And then were was the formidable Yeats… Feodor Dostoevsky was another of the author’s favorite writers at this time (the late 80s and early 90s). Among the ‘taught’ writers in high school, Faulkner, Woolf, Blake, Marquez, Hopkins and Poe.

These and other fiction authors exposed Christopher Deliso to other traditions of thought, and helped develop his interests in philosophy and theology from the early 90s. These included Buddhism, Hinduism and the various early and medieval Christian traditions. He undertook, never systematically but always out of some great fervor, the study of the pre-Socratics, of Plato and the neo-Platonists, the Desert Fathers, and so on. He studied Early Modern philosophy, the post-modernists, and from that time reversed focus into literature, picking up new influences along the way.

The most enduring of these would have to be Jorge Luis Borges and Flann O;Brien (Brian O’Nolan) in the latter part of the 1990s. Another ‘late influence’ would be Ernest Hemingway (of course, the author had read his novels in high school but was never particularly moved by them; much later, reading A Moveable Feast made the author re-appraise his view of Hemingway).

Today, Christopher Deliso remains an avid reader on a daily basis of all sorts of work, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, often finding that it can be used in the strangest of places when you look at it right, in the form of new (or cyclical?) forms of writing.