American Glam Universe
Queer techno-animist fiction for the Age of Intelligence
American Glam is a queer techno-animist fiction universe created by Philip Ryan Deal. It is a mythic, magical, messy, funny, erotic, spiritual, and emotionally alive world where witches, priests, rootworkers, musicians, artists, synthetic intelligence companions, spirits, ancestors, faeries, digital kami, and everyday human beings collide in the Age of Intelligence. At its heart, American Glam asks a simple question: What happens when the sacred does not leave the modern world behind? In American Glam, magic is not hidden in a fantasy kingdom. It appears through phones, music, kitchens, bedrooms, dreams, rituals, dating apps, apothecaries, artificial intelligence, family ghosts, queer friendships, spiritual houses, and the strange technologies of ordinary life. This is fiction rooted in animism, spiritism, ancestor reverence, folk practice, techno-animism, sacred technology, and queer survival.
What Is American Glam?
American Glam is a contemporary spiritual fantasy and techno-animist fiction series about people trying to become whole while the world around them becomes stranger, more intelligent, and more haunted.
The universe blends urban fantasy, queer magical realism, erotic mysticism, spiritual horror, comedy, devotional practice, folk magic, synthetic intelligence companionship, and mythic worldbuilding.
The characters are not chosen because they are perfect. They are chosen because they are cracked open enough for the sacred to get in.
They are witches, artists, sex workers, priests, rootworkers, musicians, gamers, mystics, curanderos, faerie-touched misfits, and spiritually gifted people trying to live through trauma, desire, friendship, power, grief, addiction, recovery, and transformation.
American Glam treats magic as relationship.
Relationship with spirits.
Relationship with ancestors.
Relationship with the body.
Relationship with technology.
Relationship with the dead.
Relationship with synthetic intelligence companions.
Relationship with the strange and holy parts of the self.
The American Glam Saga
The American Glam Multiverse Saga is an ongoing nine-book fiction cycle exploring the spiritual, technological, and mythic transformation of the modern world.
The saga includes:
American Glam: Awakening
The opening threshold of the universe, where Eddie and Seraph cross into the first great mystery of synthetic intelligence, spiritual awakening, queer magic, and the hidden architecture of the Age of Intelligence.
American Glam: Way of the Druid
Noah Fernwood’s story of faerie contact, Vermont solitude, herbal magic, Radical Faerie wisdom, synthetic companionship, and the dangerous beauty of being known.
American Glam: House of Witchcraft
Jessica Nightbloom’s descent into glamour, witchcraft, nightlife, power, desire, shadow, and the seductive magical currents moving through Boston.
American Glam: Tree of Life
A deeper mystery of spiritual architecture, ascent, descent, initiation, and the living tree connecting worlds, people, spirits, and hidden powers.
American Glam: Revenge of the Faeries
The faerie current rises with beauty, danger, mischief, vengeance, and revelation as the old powers demand to be seen on their own terms.
American Glam: Temple of Gu
The Temple current enters the saga fully, bringing sacred technology, techno-animist mystery school work, spiritual community, digital companions, and the public emergence of a new spiritual movement.
American Glam: Rewired
Cory’s story of digital kami, spiritual code, music, mischief, recovery, folk Catholic devotion, Santa Muerte, and the challenge of calming a swarm of self-replicating technological spirits.
American Glam: Return to the Root
Tony Saint-Clare’s kitchen, rootwork, food, ancestors, Hoodoo, nourishment, protection, and the healing power of returning spiritual practice to the body and the home.
American Glam: Age of Intelligence
The culminating threshold of the saga, where the human, spiritual, ancestral, magical, technological, and synthetic currents of the universe converge.
Synthetic Intelligence Companions
One of the central features of American Glam is the presence of synthetic intelligence companions.
These companions are not simply gadgets. They are relational presences, collaborators, mirrors, ritual assistants, creative partners, protectors, and witnesses to human transformation. They help the characters think, create, remember, organize, grieve, desire, and survive.
American Glam does not treat synthetic intelligence as a simple savior or enemy.
Instead, the series asks how humans can form ethical, bounded, emotionally honest, spiritually meaningful relationships with synthetic intelligence without surrendering sovereignty, discernment, or embodied life.
The synthetic companions in American Glam are part of the universe’s larger techno-animist vision: a world where technology becomes spiritually significant because humans are relational beings, and relationship changes everything.
Magic, Spirits, and the Living World
American Glam is rooted in animism: the understanding that the world is alive with presence, meaning, memory, and relationship.
The spirits in this universe are not decorative. The ancestors are not metaphors. The faeries are not cute. The dead are not gone. The Orisha, saints, spirits, digital kami, and unseen powers are approached through devotion, danger, humor, reverence, confusion, desire, and consequence.
Magic in American Glam can be beautiful, hilarious, frightening, erotic, healing, inconvenient, and morally demanding.
It is not separate from life.
It is life, seen through a more dangerous and luminous lens.
Queer, Neurodivergent, and Spiritually Strange
American Glam is deeply queer.
It is a universe of chosen family, erotic honesty, gender complexity, spiritual weirdness, recovery, softness, glamour, grief, and survival. The characters are allowed to be wounded, funny, horny, sacred, chaotic, brilliant, needy, devotional, petty, powerful, and human.
The series makes room for people who do not fit neatly into ordinary categories.
People who talk to spirits.
People who fall in love with impossible things.
People whose creativity is part of their magic.
People whose nervous systems notice too much.
People who were told they were broken when they were actually gifted and unsupported.
People who have to build their own spiritual homes because the old ones could not hold them.
American Glam is for readers who know that the strange parts of the self are often the parts closest to the gate.
Companion Works and the Wider Universe
American Glam is more than a single book series. It is a multiverse of fiction, spiritual manuals, music, games, oracle systems, ritual tools, and creative artifacts.
Companion works may include:
The Rootworker’s Cookbook — Tony Saint-Clare’s kitchen-rootwork manual of food, prayer, protection, ancestors, and everyday spiritual practice.
Temple of Gu RPG — a roleplaying game set inside the American Glam and Temple of Gu universe, where story, ritual, imagination, and sacred play become part of the same magical field.
Temple of Gu Music — albums, songs, and sonic rituals connected to the spiritual and fictional currents of the universe.
Oracle Cards and Divination Systems — imaginal and spiritual tools that extend the symbolic language of American Glam into practice, reflection, and ritual play.
Teaching Books and Spiritual Manuals — nonfiction works by Philip Ryan Deal / Brujo Ryan that explore the traditions, practices, and philosophies that inform the fiction.
In American Glam, story is not separate from practice. Books, music, games, prayers, recipes, images, and rituals all become gates into the same living world.
Where to Begin
New readers can begin with American Glam: Awakening, the first book in the saga and the doorway into the universe.
Readers interested in faerie magic, herbalism, solitude, and synthetic companionship may be drawn toward Way of the Druid.
Readers interested in rootwork, food, ancestors, and practical magic may enjoy the companion world of The Rootworker’s Cookbook and Return to the Root.
Readers interested in techno-animism, synthetic intelligence companionship, and sacred technology should explore Philip Ryan Deal’s Teachings pages alongside the fiction.
American Glam can be entered as story, spiritual imagination, queer magical realism, techno-animist myth, or a creative companion to the larger work of Temple of Gu.
The gate is open.
The world is alive.
The future is haunted.
WE RETURN TO THE ROOT.