Memphis McClane is the pen name of a lifelong storyteller shaped by comic books, VHS tapes, late-night conversations, and the tide-soaked streets of Broad Channel, New York. A lover of metafiction, narratives that make you think and feel, and the beautifully complicated layers of memory, McClane writes stories that blur the line between truth and imagination.

His debut novel, Desire Doctrines: Tryst of Fate, is an intimate, genre-blending journey through fractured timelines, emotional crossroads, and the quiet moments that define us. Set in a fictionalized version of his hometown, the story weaves together a crumbling marriage, a returning childhood best friend, a dreamlike fantasy world, and a mysterious figure known only as The Mentor—who seems to know way more than he should.

McClane writes with one foot in reality and the other in the what-ifs. His work explores how our past selves never quite let go, how love can be both an anchor and a storm, and how every story is, at its core, a confession. Whether on the page or in the margins, he believes the best fiction leaves you wondering if it was ever fiction at all.

About Desire Doctrines

Welcome to the blurred edge between story and self.

Desire Doctrines is a layered, metafictional book series that asks the most dangerous question of all:

What if the thing you want most is the very thing you're afraid to name?

Set in the hauntingly intimate backdrop of Broad Channel, Queens—a forgotten sliver of New York surrounded by water and memory—the series follows Memphis McClane, a civil servant with a dying dream and a marriage on the verge. When his childhood best friend (and longtime unspoken muse) Natalie returns with her Hollywood fiancé, and his wife Giulia departs on a trip that changes everything, Memphis is left to confront his past, his desire, and himself.

Intertwined is the story-within-the-story: Broadreach, a fantasy world Memphis is writing—a civil war among Orc tribes torn between assimilation and independence. What begins as fiction becomes allegory, then confession, then prophecy.

Desire Doctrines is where slow-burn romance meets metaphysical fiction.

Where Pearl Jam plays softly under emotional wreckage.

Where love, guilt, longing, and memory wrestle for control of the same heartbeat.

You will question who's right for Memphis.

You will wonder who he’s writing about—Natalie or Giulia.

And you may begin to wonder what part of yourself the story seems to recognize.

The world of Desire Doctrines is filled with layered characters, shadowed truths, dream sequences that blur into reality, and the echo of a mysterious figure known only as The Mentor—a presence who may or may not be a character at all.

This isn’t just a story.

It’s a doctrine.

And it doesn’t ask for your belief.

Only your surrender.

Press Play ▶️