Edward S Zalewski

Edward S. Zalewski writes speculative fiction that explores the collision of faith, science, folklore, and cosmic mystery—stories where ancient beliefs meet impossible revelations, and ordinary people are forced to confront the spiritual fault lines beneath the world they thought they understood.

Born and raised in a steel town in Western Pennsylvania, he grew up surrounded by blast furnaces, Catholic guilt, and woods that seemed to hold their breath after dark. Those early landscapes taught him that mystery does not always announce itself with thunder. Sometimes it waits in the trees, in the silence after a church bell, or in the uneasy feeling that the world is larger—and stranger—than anyone admits.

Edward entered the University of Pittsburgh as an engineering major, a decision that pleased his parents and confused his soul. He soon defected to English, where he discovered he was far more interested in building worlds, characters, and impossible questions than anything requiring a calculator, hard hat, or responsible career trajectory.

Before turning to writing full time, he spent years in the technology world, eventually serving as an IT Director. That experience proved unexpectedly useful for speculative fiction: hidden systems, unseen vulnerabilities, machines that behave almost—but not quite—as promised, and the unnerving knowledge that civilization depends on things most people never see.

After continuing his creative writing studies at UCLA, Edward began exploring stories that bring together spiritual longing, technological unease, and the fragile assumptions people build their lives upon.

His debut novel, The Shroud Project, is a cyberpunk theological thriller imagining a modern messiah in a dystopian megacity. Through Her Eyes explores identity, transformation, and forbidden selfhood in a rigid colony world. The Legend of Dunchee’s Hollow returns to the haunted hills of Western Pennsylvania, where folklore, conspiracy, and buried history refuse to stay underground.

With The Hosts of Heaven, Edward turns his gaze upward. Inspired by renewed public fascination with alien disclosure, ancient mysteries, and the persistent claim that contact with nonhuman intelligence would shatter religious faith, he asks a different question: What if the universe is not too large for God, but larger because of Him?

Edward lives in Southern California with his wife, two daughters, and a talkative Siberian Husky who insists on going for a walk every day at precisely 5 p.m. When not writing, Edward can be found reading science fiction, pondering spiritual mysteries, serving in his church community, or looking at the night sky and wondering what else might be looking back.