J. X. Caltraf writes stories about the kind of people who don’t get parades.

Raised in a forgotten strip of rural Kentucky, Caltraf grew up around men who worked hard, kept quiet, and carried more than they said. He left home young and spent his early adult life in the U.S. Army, then several years overseas as a private military adviser and security contractor. Two decades later, the dust has mostly washed off—but the questions never did.

After leaving that world, he enrolled in a small community college and fell headfirst into literature. Hemingway, O’Connor, Solzhenitsyn, McCarthy, Barker, King—writers who didn’t flinch. In those pages he recognized the moral gray he’d lived in, and realized he didn’t just want to remember those shadows; he wanted to interrogate them.

Demon Doctrine is where that work begins.

Caltraf’s fiction lives at the collision of faith, violence, loyalty, and consequence. He writes about soldiers and civilians who bleed, break, and keep going; about institutions that demand too much; about monsters outside the wire and the ones you bring home inside your ribs. His worlds are brutal, but never careless. The body count matters. The cost matters. The quiet moments matter most.

Now based in Alabama, he writes at a plain wooden desk with a mug of bad coffee, a stack of dog-eared paperbacks, and an old habit of always knowing where the exits are. When he’s notworking, you’ll find him reading obscure military histories, wandering back roads, or sitting in the far corner of a diner where nobody feels the need to talk.

What You Can Expect from a J. X. Caltraf Novel

• Authentic mindset, human stakes. He writes soldiers, contractors, and leaders like people, not action figures—flawed, faithful, fearful, and sometimes dangerous.
• Moral and spiritual weight. His stories wrestle with belief, doubt, guilt, obedience, and what it means to be “good” when the rules don’t fit the battlefield.
• No easy absolution. There are victories, but they’re earned. No choreographed hero worship, no cheap cynicism.
• Grim, grounded, supernatural. When the supernatural shows up, it feels like an intrusion into a real world, not an escape from it.