J. Zachary Pike is an American fantasy author from the New Hampshire seacoast, best known for the Dark Profit Saga, a comic epic fantasy that runs the machinery of high finance through a world of orcs and wizards.
A New Englander 'by birth and by temperament', he works by day as a web and creative professional and has written and directed award-winning short films - one, The Toll, took a Zelig Award - before turning his offbeat humour to novels. He cheerfully describes himself as a former 'basement-dwelling fantasy gamer' who 'metamorphosed into a basement-dwelling fantasy writer', and names Douglas Adams and, above all, Terry Pratchett's Discworld as his guiding lights.
The saga opens with Orconomics (2014), set on the world of Arth - 'much like our own but with more magic and fewer vowels' - where the washed-up hero Gorm Ingerson is dragged into a quest that doubles as a merciless satire of banking and speculation. It continues in Son of a Liche and concludes in Dragonfired. Orconomics won the fourth Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, tying the highest score in the contest's history.
He continues to write 'strangely funny fiction' set in the ever-expanding world of Arth.
