Thornton Sumner was born in Seattle, and was educated at the Northwest College of Art, in Poulsbo, Washington. Before becoming a full-time writer, he pursued a number of odd professions which included: ballroom dance instructor, timberman for the Department of National Resources, and freelance artist painting murals and portraits. He currently lives with his cat, Diallo, in their apartment in Seattle.
Dune
Of all the books that have shaped me as a writer, Dune stands above the rest. Others — Tolkien among them — influenced my love of invented languages and mythic backstory, but only in Frank Herbert’s work do I hear a kindred author’s voice each time I return to it. His world‑building is vast yet intimate, his ecology and politics intricately layered, and his weaving of philosophy and religion feels effortless within the sweep of an epic.
What astonishes me is how Dune rewards the reader on so many levels at once — the surface narrative, the cultural depth, the spiritual undercurrents, the psychological nuance. Each rereading reveals something new. That is the effect I strive for in my own work: stories that continue to unfold long after the first pass, offering fresh payoffs every time they’re revisited.
Watership Down
This is another book I never tire of rereading. Richard Adams elevates what could have been a simple story about rabbits into a profound exploration of survival on an epic scale. It carries an emotional depth, a sense of community, and the quiet heroism of ordinary lives that is hard to find in genre fiction.
The influence of this book on me is especially clear in my use of Tapu, a trickster hare within Batu mythology. Tapu is a direct homage to El‑Ahrairah, the folkloric hero of Adams’s world. There are many such intertextual threads woven throughout my writing, each one a small tribute to a master storyteller whose work showed me how myth, culture, and narrative can intertwine to create something enduring.
The Sandman
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series is the kind of work that makes me want to stop creating fiction and simply read it. The worlds he builds, the characters he shapes, the mythic threads he weaves together — they’re so nuanced and alive that I sometimes wonder why I bother writing when something like Sandman already exists.
But that question circles back to the reason I’ve spent more than seventeen years building my own epic. For all the authors I’ve loved, voices like Gaiman’s are rare. It takes endurance to sift through the endless noise of fiction to find the few works that resonate on a deeper level.
I’ve never encountered anything quite like what I’m attempting with the Batu saga. And, now that I think about it, I wonder if Gaiman felt the same way when he began Sandman — that sense of stepping into a story only he could tell. I’d like to think so.
Lost Horizon
There’s something timeless and serene about what James Hilton achieved in Lost Horizon. This is the novel that gave us the word Shangri‑La — a symbol of a peaceful, hidden paradise untouched by the noise of the modern world. Hilton’s blend of adventure, mystery, and quiet philosophical longing captures that universal desire for something beyond the ordinary. In many ways, that longing has shaped my entire life.
Yes, placing my own peaceful tribe within an isolated valley paradise has become something of a cliché, even before Hilton did it. And cliché is death for an author. But Hilton proved that it’s not the trope that matters — it’s the execution. And now it’s my turn, taking an old archetype and making it my own.
A Visual Writer
As an artist trained at the Northwest College of Art, I approach epic fantasy with a painter’s eye. For me, world-building is a multi-disciplinary craft where the canvas and the manuscript constantly inform one another. Whether interpreting the raw, untamed spirit of wildlife or capturing character traits in portraiture, my visual art is an exercise in translating texture, light, and atmosphere into a tangible form.
Ultimately, this lifelong pursuit of visual expression found its truest, most unrestricted freedom in the sprawling landscapes of fiction. Some say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I believe the most evocative pictures are painted with words—where the reader becomes an active participant in the process of imagination.
