About
Drawing from his versatile background as a fiction writer, Army veteran, and retired corrections officer, Jacob masterfully weaves gripping narratives that captivate and haunt readers.
Early Inspiration
Jacob Moon is an independent author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Born and raised in Minnesota, he began writing creatively in his early teens. Inspired by such writers as Stephen King, Louis L’Amour, and Agatha Christie, as well as TV/films such as The Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories, Jacob was soon fascinated with horror, science fiction, and the supernatural.
Military Service
After relocating to Florida during high school, Jacob enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii (for war movie buffs, his infantry unit was the same one depicted in the movie Platoon).
Corrections Career
After the military, Jacob returned to Florida, where he found work at a local sheriff’s office before kicking off a 28-year career as a Sergeant at a large Florida-based maximum security prison. He spent the first part of his career assigned to inmate housing, with the last 15 years overseeing psychiatric unit care.
What's next for Jacob...
A proud father of two, Jacob currently resides in Clearwater, Florida, where he is free to wander as his heart pleases, writing at local coffee shops and restaurants. When not writing, you can find Jacob traveling across the country, enjoying sporting events, author conferences, spending quality time with family and friends, and reading! He also lends advice on writing and editing, with an emphasis on the self-publishing process.
Writing
A pivotal experience during his early days in the Army inspired his seminal short story “Seven Generals,” written twenty-five years after the fact. It was published in the March 2019 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, and can be found on his short fiction page. His first novel, Furlough (published in 2020), is the tale of a man jailed for a crime he did not commit who escapes prison hoping to find the young son he has never met. He must race against a self-imposed deadline to find his son before he’s promised to turn himself back in, all while eluding both the police and a mysterious killer in search of him.
Jacob’s non-fiction article on prison escapes in literature appeared in the Spring 2021 edition of Mystery and Suspense Magazine and can be found on his blog. The article focuses on two of his favorite jailbreak novels—The Count of Monte Cristo and Shawshank Redemption. It draws from his 28 years of extensive experience working with psychiatric inmates in a maximum-security prison.
In 2022, while reading a newspaper article, Jacob found inspiration for his second novel, the supernatural suspense tale Dead Reckoning. A tabloid writer covering a series of grisly murders discovers a possible supernatural connection to his town’s deadly, century-old race riot. Struggling with ghosts of his own past, he realizes that he alone must stop the vengeful spirit before his soul and that of those closest to him are lost forever.
His latest novel, Letter 26 (released December 2024), is a horror thriller set in his birth state of Minnesota. It’s a return to his first love of writing—the scary story—and centers on an inventive serial killer and an unusual aspect of the mortuary science field. His current work-in-progress is a memoir based on his recent 28-year career in corrections.
