About H. J. Buell

H.J. Buell was born in Appalachia, the oldest of six children. He learned early that the useful things get said sideways, if they get said at all, which is most of what he knows about writing.

Being the oldest of six is a decent apprenticeship for a novelist. You learn to read a room from the doorway, to tell when a quiet person is not fine, and to keep track of five other people's business while appearing to keep track of none of it. He has not found a writing exercise since that taught him more.

He left home at fifteen and later spent twenty years outside the United States. The work he did in those years is not described in his books and will not be. He came home in 2023 and has stayed.

As a founding member of a veterans motorcycle club, he has been riding for more than thirty years. His road name is Bones, which he lent to the man at the center of this book. That is as much of the resemblance as he intends to confirm.

The first three books are a prose adaptation of Shota Rustaveli's twelfth-century Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther's Skin. Honest Weather is his fourth. A fifth is underway, expected in late 2026 or early 2027, depending on the weather.

He writes about men who have done things they cannot explain, and about the long ordinary work of coming back from them. He writes about consent, about the difference between letting a person go and losing them, and about the people who hold a life together without asking to be thanked for it.

His interest in the fae is the interest his grandmother's generation had in them, which is to say a matter of rules and courtesies rather than costume. What you take. What you give. What you do not ask.

He lives in Rehoboth, Delaware, where the wind comes off the water and the trees turn early.