Dyrk Ashton was born in Athens (Ohio, not Greece) on a chilly Halloween morning. He earned a BFA and masters degrees in filmmaking at The Ohio State University, which lead to working in film production in Columbus, OH, where he crawled his way up from production assistant to grip then production manager and producer for commercials, industrial films and low budget features. He then headed west to Los Angeles where he wrote and pitched scripts but fed and clothed himself as a “jack-of-all-trades”: editor, assistant editor, location sound recordist, cinematographer, assistant director, production manager, producer, you name it.
Paternus: Rise of Gods by Dyrk Ashton
Paternus: Rise of Gods (2016) is described in the first line of its Amazon page as being “American Gods meets the X-Men,” which isn’t a bad five-and-a-hyphen word summary, really. By the time you get to “Sumerian/Akkadian/Greek/Aztec/Norse/etc./etc./etc., gods are really all the same people and they’re the children of a guy who’s like Ego from Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2,” you’ve more than lost in brevity and wit what you’ve made up for in accuracy. Still, gaining in accuracy is worth something, and since I have more than five words of space available, well, that’s my one-sentence summary of the background of the book. The central conceit of the story is that the divine figures of human history are the children of the Paternus of the title and females o... Read More
