25: A Story of Survival, Solitude, and Choosing Where You Belong

by Christopher Ray

197 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2026

About the author

Christopher Ray has worked construction since the day he graduated high school, chasing jobs across the country — a working life that's put him in more corners of America than most people ever see. Growing up in rural Alabama, days spent outdoors meant days spent in his own head, and the habit of imagining never left him. He's been collecting songs and story ideas since he was a boy, filling in the empty spaces the road and the woods left for him.
He grew up on Louis L'Amour, and that early diet of westerns still shows — his own fiction lives at the crossroads of western, Southern noir, and stories of faith tested hard, where the land and the people are cut from the same cloth.
When he isn't writing fiction, he's writing lyrics — country, gospel, and the occasional rock song, all pulling from the same well: people, the places that made them, and the road home.
Ask him what he's proudest of, though, and it isn't a book. It's being a father. As he puts it: "Words may be the only thing I leave my kids, but they'll be well written."
He still travels for construction work today, and he still calls Alabama home.