Duskin Hill | Author & Storyteller
I write upmarket suspense/thriller and historical fiction—rooted in Texas and the Southwest, reaching far beyond it.
About the author
He spent ten years listening to people tell the truth for the first time.
Before he was a novelist, Duskin worked in the mental health field as a social worker and counselor—a decade of sitting across from people in crisis, learning how trauma rewrites memory, how families construct a survivable version of events and then defend it for generations, and how institutions fail the very people they were built to protect. That work is the engine under his fiction: the motive beneath the motive, the slow reveal, the character who is telling the truth and still lying.
Then he spent twenty more writing for people who couldn't afford a bad sentence.
Duskin's writing career began in journalism, on his high school and later his college newspapers, and widened from there—marketing writing, technical writing, blog and long-form content, and speechwriting for CEOs and company presidents. Writing words that other people would stand up and say in public teaches discipline no workshop does: structure, pacing, and the ruthless cut. That training is on every page.
He now designs the systems his novels distrust.
Today Duskin works in front-end web design, development, and UX research. User eXperience is the study of how people navigate systems, interpret information, and react when a system's language doesn't match its behavior. That lens—evidence, institutional power, and the quiet ways designed environments decide what a person is allowed to see—runs straight through his fiction's courthouses, archives, records offices, and small towns that would rather not be asked.
The last calling.
It's the last field he plans to change—call it finally growing up, or finally admitting what the job was always going to be: writing novels, full-time.
B.A. Sociology, minor in Communication Studies — Texas Tech University
The work: Three genres, one obsession—with a Southwestern undertow.
Duskin writes across suspense, thriller, neo-Western, historical fiction, and horror — not as a scattershot, but because they all circle the same question: what happens when the accepted story and the real one stop matching, and someone decides to find out why.
- Suspense & thriller — investigation and revelation driven by a counselor's read on what people conceal and what it costs them.
- Historical fiction — genealogy as excavation. A document proves a person was born, married, moved, served, owned land, or died. It rarely explains what they feared, hid, or never resolved.
- Horror — dread located in inheritance, institutions, and ground, more than in the supernatural.
- Neo-Western textures — land, water, money, and consequence in a modern Southwest still governed by older rules, running through the suspense and historical work even where the genre itself isn't a straight Western.
His work is regionally specific without being nostalgic. Texas and the Southwest is beautiful, sustaining, contradictory, and unforgiving at once — and land, water, and public records preserve history very differently than people do.
Identity: Two cultures, one person, and a lifetime of being told to pick.
Duskin is Korean American (mixed-race —describes himself as Texarean), and that has shaped how he thinks about belonging, family, memory, and the gap between how people understand themselves and how others define them. Growing up inside the pull of two cultures brought both cost and reward—questions of heritage, assimilation, expectation, and what a family preserves versus what it agrees never to mention.
That experience is why diversity is structural in his work rather than decorative. His novels are populated by characters navigating divided identities, inherited silence, and pressure to compress a complicated history into a simpler public story. He writes from the conviction that cultural identity is neither a problem to be solved nor a single explanation for a person, but a living accumulation of family, place, language, loss, humor, and choice.
Ground: Texas made him. It didn't confine him.
Raised in the Houston area. Educated at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, out on the South Plains. Years in Denver, Colorado, and in Austin. Deep family roots in West Texas and East Texas. Now based in Katy, Texas.
But the map runs wider. Duskin has traveled extensively across North America and internationally — including a journey through the Soviet Union in 1988, at the height of glasnost, visiting Estonia, then-Leningrad, and Moscow. Standing inside a system in its final years complicated everything he'd learned about it from books, and permanently shaped his belief that official accounts describe a country the way they describe a family: accurately, and without the truth in it.
He returns hardest to two places outside Texas: the Rocky Mountains, where altitude, water rights, and isolation do to people what the Caprock does; and New England, where the ground is older than the country and holds its secrets differently. Both have novels in them.
An outdoorsman and an environmentalist, Duskin writes land under pressure — development, water, extraction, and erasure — as consequence rather than scenery.
Beyond the page: two adopted Great Pyrenees have opinions about his writing schedule.
Duskin lives in Katy with his wife, his two teen daughters, and Oakley and Poppi, a pair of adopted Great Pyrenees who supervise everything, guard nothing that needs guarding, and reliably keep him on his toes.
When he isn't writing or working, he's researching family genealogy for himself and others, out in the field somewhere between the Gulf Coast and the Front Range, following Texas Tech athletics, or collecting a detail that will surface in a novel three years from now.
Ready to talk manuscripts?
Whether you're a literary agent looking to represent a manuscript, an editor scouting new voices, or a reader who wants to know when the first book lands—reach out. Query letters, professional inquiries, and general hellos are all welcome.