How it all began—Nature’s inspirations
The vision began here—kayaking Kingdom Lake, British Columbia, Canada—the moment I understood what had always been there: a jagged rock rising from the water like an ancient Sphinx, and I named it Maalik, Chief of the Dark Angels. Its malformed bite, grim malocclusion, seeping pus and blood—legs sinking into the depths—hulking, primeval, watching. The rock loomed, its jagged snout jutting into the water, rough yet unmistakable: a prehistoric sentinel, a beast carved from the bones of the world, etched into the Cascade Mountains along the Pacific Ring of Fire. From there, The Lost World of Mythoamphibia was born.
Michael J. Meraw (Major, Retired), CD, MBA, BComm, AGDM, SCPM (Stanford University) is an author whose work delves into the dark intersection of environmental collapse, existential reckoning, and humanity’s unrelenting impact on the planet and on the vulnerable lives caught inside its systems of power. As a former military pilot and corporate aerospace leader, he brings a hard-won perspective on survival, control, and power dynamics that shapes his exploration of humanity’s tenuous hold on the natural world.
He channels these experiences into narratives that challenge the myth of human dominance. His stories trace what happens when the earth stops forgiving us—when rivers remember, forests reclaim, species speak back, and when human-made systems like cartel camps become closed ecosystems of inherited violence.
As a foreigner now living in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, he writes from inside the region that shapes Cartel Babies and the everyday lives lived in its shadow. This gives him a ground-level view of Mexico’s “third face” of cartel power—the quiet majority who navigate fear, loyalty, and survival while trying to protect their families inside a system they did not choose.
All of Meraw’s fiction unfolds within the interconnected EᴠØ-Myth Universe™, a transmedia world of games, films, and novels where conscience evolves, creation keeps score, and every species bears the cost of what only one species created.
Cartel Babies – upmarket suspense
Set in present-day Sinaloa, Mexico, Cartel Babies follows Michael Salter, a retired Canadian military pilot and aerospace executive who is abducted along the highway between Culiacán and Mazatlán and taken deep into the Sierra Madre. Forced into a remote cartel camp embedded within a hidden labor network sustaining northwest Mexico’s synthetic-drug economy, survival depends not on resistance, but on learning its unwritten rules: who is protected, who is expendable, and how long a man can remain useful before he disappears. As he becomes entangled with the camp’s leadership and forms an unexpected bond with a young boy growing up inside the system, captivity begins to blur into something more dangerous than confinement. If he refuses to bend, he risks a shallow grave in the mountains; if he adapts too well, he risks becoming part of the system itself—too useful to release, too compromised to leave clean. A feature-length screenplay adaptation has also been developed as a parallel narrative for film and television.
Let the River Decide – upmarket eco-thriller
Mike and his stepfather Cliff travel 8,000 kilometers from Bralorne, British Columbia, to the Arctic Ocean and back, with two dogs in tow. Along the road, they encounter tainted waterways, vanishing wildlife, and a pattern of disappearances that echo northern Elders’ warning: the river keeps score—and when humans push the balance too far, it reclaims.
The Book of Dominatus – an eco-horror mythic cycle
A three-part literary series blending eco-horror, speculative mythology, and environmental reckoning into a unified mythos.
Book I — The Lost World of Mythoamphibia – literary eco-horror
Set against British Columbia’s Cascade Mountains, The Lost World of Mythoamphibia follows a poisoned lake that awakens as both witness and judge, where amphibian myth collides with human desecration in a literary horror of conscience. A feature-length screenplay adaptation also exists, and the story anchors DOMINATUS: Scriptures & Rot, a narrative-driven horror board game rooted in the EᴠØ-Myth Multiverse™.
Book II — Return to the Source – literary speculative fiction
Spanning prehistory, early humanity, and cosmology, Return to the Source follows God as She journeys across the multiverse to confront Her Sisters and the unintended consequences of creation. As Neanderthals and Homo sapiens emerge along divergent paths, a lone human known as the Fourth is drawn into a decision that will test the boundaries of conscience and determine which lineage endures. Beneath it all lies a deeper tension—divine frustration with a species that reshapes the world faster than it understands it—revealing the fracture at the heart of creation and forming the mythic spine of The Book of Dominatus.
Book III — King Amphibia’s Rise (in development) – near-future literary eco-horror
Set in a near-future world, the story follows the emergence of a regenerative amphibian sovereign born from the fusion of Toadstone and Mother-of-Pearl, forcing humanity to choose between stewardship and surrender.
Across novels, screenplays, and game design, Meraw’s work explores consequence, survival, and the systems—human and natural—that shape civilization. In an age when nature begins to answer back, his writing asks a single question: What happens when the natural world finally stops forgiving us?
EᴠØ-Myth™ and EᴠØ-Myth Universe™ are trademarks of Michael J. Meraw.