I write across forms—fiction, screenwriting, game lore—often weaving together themes of memory, estrangement, control, and the quiet absurdities of modern life. My debut novel Tepemizdeki Gölge (The Shadow Above Us) blends science fiction and satire, and received multiple awards. My second book, the novella İDÜK, was published by İthaki in early 2024.
I also wrote the screenplay for Siren’s Call, which premiered in the main competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2018. Beyond page and screen, I’ve created original narrative universes for two game projects—Dan Black: Fate of Apocalypse (Nowhere Studios) and Monstrous (Red Disk Games)—each involving over 50,000 words of lore, characters, histories, and world mechanics.
Below you’ll find published, produced, nearly-produced, and still-in-progress narrative work.
NOVELLA: İDÜK – 2024
İDÜK is a dreamlike novella about a towering, unknowable presence that appears one night, carved into the very edge of the Bosphorus. Its name—İdük—is whispered across Istanbul’s streets like a riddle without a key. No one knows what it wants, or even if it knows itself. It might brush against you during a midnight ferry ride, slip into your dreams after that unnecessary third lahmacun, or linger in the fog like a ghost too ashamed to ask for forgiveness. Both omen and miracle, İdük is a metaphysical fable about longing, fear, and the strange dignity of the unexplained—a quiet collision between the ordinary and the mythic.
NOVEL: TEPEMİZDEKİ GÖLGE – 2020
Tepemizdeki Gölge is the story of Mehmet Kunduracı—a man who believes he’s exceptional, obsessed with writing, quietly proud of himself—until he meets a “perfect” woman and slowly finds himself taking over his father’s humble shoe repair shop. What begins as a personal detour spirals into something far stranger, stretching from Eskişehir to Europe to the stars. Blending sharp humor with existential drift, the novel is a nimble, genre-bending work of speculative realism—where screwdrivers, delusions, and destinies intertwine. With echoes of Murakami, Roth, Svevo, and Vonnegut, it offers a voice that’s both familiar and unlike anything else in Turkish literature.
SCREENPLAY: SIREN’S CALL – 2018
Siren’s Call is my debut feature-length screenplay, brought to life on screen and premiered in the Main Competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival. The film follows a weary architect whose accidental reunion with a long-lost friend compels him to walk away from his numbing routine in Istanbul. Drawn to the raw beauty of Turkey’s southern coast, he begins an unexpected journey toward clarity, disillusionment, and the quiet chaos of starting over. At its core, Siren’s Call is a fun meditation on escape, estrangement, and the fragile hope of transformation.
OTHER NARRATIVE WORK:
THE DAYS WE DIE – INSTAGRAM COMIC STRIP – 2021
A short absurdist comic strip following four skeletons as they attempt to uncover the circumstances of their deaths. Equal parts existential and ridiculous, the story unfolds through fragmented memories, false leads, and philosophical bickering—until the pointlessness of the quest itself becomes the punchline.
The artist: Gökçe Erverdi
RESTORATION – NOT PUBLISHED – 2016-2018
A graphic novel project set in the aftermath of Earth’s collapse. Two spacecrafts—Tigris and Euphrates—are launched to preserve humanity, but only Tigris escapes. Years later, an alien AI-organism named Zayeh discovers the dormant Euphrates and uses its contents to build a planet-museum (“Musearth”), recreating six human cities based on the memories and subconscious fears of the astronauts. To break the planetary simulation’s control and restart civilization, survivors from Tigris must infiltrate each city, locate and free the captive astronauts. Their only hope: waking a deeply programmed clone named Hayal from a fabricated Istanbul dreamscape of poverty, longing, and lost motherhood—only to realize she’s chasing a version of herself. What begins as a rescue mission becomes a metaphysical struggle between singularity and selfhood.
The artist Ali Çetinkaya draw the first two issues. The rest eleven issues are waiting to be drawn by an available artist.
THE AWKWARD SILENCES – ONLINE COMIC STRIP – 2013
Eight friends living in Istanbul navigate the comedy and melancholy of daily life—love, awkwardness, boredom, and absurdity. Each strip consists of eight panels, one of which is always a full-panel silence.
The artist: Engin Yağmurdereli
GAME WRITING & WORLD-BUILDING
Though ultimately unproduced, I collaborated with two ambitious game studios in Turkey to build original narrative universes from the ground up. For each project, I developed over 50,000 words of lore—crafting characters, maps, histories, legends, political systems, and story arcs.
Dan Black: Fate of Apocalypse – Nowhere Studios
Working with Nowhere Studios, I created the full narrative backbone for Dan Black: Fate of Apocalypse. The project involved shaping a dark post-apocalyptic world with deep internal logic—blending myth, science fiction, and fragmented memory into a playable universe.
🔗 Nowhere Studios
Monstrous – Red Disk Games
For Red Disk’s Monstrous, I wrote an expansive mythos behind the game’s noir-fantasy setting. The focus was on political intrigue, ancient curses, and the uneasy coexistence of monsters and humans in a city on the brink.
🔗 Monstrous on Steam
N. Can Kantarcı 