T.S. Ardrin is a pen name, the name under which these particular stories get told.

He writes about ordinary people confronting extraordinary forces, and the choices that determine who they become: questions of attention, belonging, and the hidden worlds beneath the familiar ones.

Ardrin didn't grow up in Brooklyn. He arrived here as an adult, the way a lot of people do, and found a place that rewarded the kind of close, patient attention he was already drawn to as a writer. Its streets, its layers, its history sitting quietly under everyday life. Over time, Brooklyn became less a backdrop for his fiction than a collaborator in it. Many of the places in The Mind Raider are places he walks regularly.

The Mind Raider is his first novel, and the first in a planned four-book series following Kiam and his friends — Leo, Ying, and Nev — through the world of Taenaria, and of Brooklyn. Each book stays with all four, but belongs, in the end, to one of them. The Mind Raider is Kiam's.

Ardrin writes occasional essays and a newsletter exploring the ideas behind his fiction: attention, power, restraint, and the quiet manipulations of everyday life.