DAVID BUNNELL

Before David J. Bunnell ever wrote a word of fiction, he spent nearly four years living and working inside a massive, fully operational mortuary. Newly married and far from home, he and his wife moved to a new city for college and took an opportunity that most people would have walked away from. He carried bodies through maze-like corridors in the middle of the night. He witnessed underground mine disaster victims come through the mortuary load-out area and watched families filter in to identify their fathers and sons by their teeth while they lay covered with a sheet on the concrete floor. He became intimately familiar with the phrase body run. And somewhere inside all of that silence and weight, a writer was born.

But the writing did not begin in the mortuary. It began on a bus. For two and a half years David commuted daily to a second job after college, one hour each way, while most passengers slept or talked. He read. Novel after novel after novel. And somewhere on that route, somewhere between the first page of one book and the last page of another, the thought arrived and refused to leave. I could do this. That single B in high school English be damned.

Years later David wrote his first novel in thirty days. Not in a quiet study or a dedicated writing space, but in a 32 square foot furnace room in his basement while his children ran and laughed overhead. He had to stop more than once. Not because he lost his train of thought. But because the story he was telling was that real. He finished the book in a month. Then he carried it for twenty seven years.

Today David is the author of three books, each one written in thirty days, each one drawn from a life fully lived.

The Winds is a literary psychological thriller set in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. It follows Cade, a man haunted by a preventable tragedy and an unforgivable choice, on a journey back to the place where everything unraveled. A story about grief, guilt, and the terrifying possibility of finally letting go.

Body Run is a raw, relentless serial killer thriller born directly from his mortuary years. When a methodical killer begins leaving engraved metal tags on victims across the city, Detective Isaak is pulled into a pursuit that cuts closer and closer to home. Written by a man who once carried the dead through real corridors at night, this is not a story imagined from a distance. It is lived, felt, and told with unflinching honesty.

Touchdown Jesus is a coming of age football story rooted in his own experiences of being uprooted, navigating bullies, and learning what it truly costs to stand up for yourself and others. When star fullback Crem Hill is dropped into a Wyoming town that has already decided who belongs, he faces his hardest opponent yet. Not on the field. In the hallways. And in the mirror.

David is also the Plant Manager of a unique cheese manufacturing facility in Idaho, a lifelong athlete who played college football, and a man who has survived a heart attack and nearly ten kidney stones and still shows up every single day with rolled up sleeves.

He still finds his greatest peace fishing the high mountain lakes of the Wind River Mountains, the same mountains that gave his most personal story its home.

His writing does not ask you to feel something. It makes you feel everything whether you are ready or not.