Author Highlight: Lee Matthew Goldberg

The Shape-Shifter, the Visionary, and the Most Unclassifiable Imagination in the Cherry Hill Publishing Catalog

Some authors build worlds. Some authors build traps. Lee Matthew Goldberg does both—then lights a fuse beneath them and smiles as readers lean in closer. Among the most inventive, fearless, and genre-fluid storytellers working today, Goldberg thrives in the spaces where familiar realities tilt into something uncanny, unsettling, or unexpectedly tender. He’s a writer who refuses to sit still, refusing to let his stories, characters, or ideas settle into easy categories.
Mystery, psychological suspense, dystopian world-building, noir, supernatural undertones, dark satire, coming-of-age drama—Goldberg uses them all as tools, alloying them with intellect, empathy, and a deep understanding of human longing. Cherry Hill Publishing is home to several of his finest works, and in audio, Goldberg’s worlds feel especially alive: intimate, dangerous, hallucinatory, and always charging toward revelations you didn’t see coming.

What sets him apart is not simply versatility. It’s ingenuity. Every Goldberg novel starts in one genre and ends in another—sometimes without the reader even noticing the seams as they shift. His narratives have a pulse, a sense of invention, a gleam in the eye that suggests he is letting you glimpse only the tip of whatever wild iceberg lies beneath.

A Multifaceted Writer with a Singular Vision

Lee Matthew Goldberg is one of the most eclectic literary talents of his generation, with work published internationally and celebrated across multiple mediums. His fiction has been nominated for the prestigious Prix du Polar European Crime Fiction Prize, and his screenplays and pilots have made him a finalist in nearly every major writing competition—Script Pipeline, Stage 32, Book Pipeline, ScreenCraft, and more.

Even before readers open one of his books, Goldberg’s creative DNA is clear: sharp prose, wicked intelligence, emotional honesty, and stories that explore the darker corners of ambition, identity, and obsession. His characters often stand on fault lines—psychological, moral, societal—where the ground beneath them shifts just as quickly as the plot.

As co-curator of New York City's Guerrilla Lit Reading Series, Goldberg is also a champion of creative community and literary experimentation. He knows storytelling from both sides: the solitary craft and the collaborative ecosystem that supports it.

The Ancestor: Goldberg’s Masterwork of Identity, Obsession, and Impossible Time

If one novel best showcases Lee Matthew Goldberg’s originality, it is The Ancestor, an eerie, hypnotic blend of historical adventure, psychological suspense, and speculative mystery.

The book opens with a man waking in the Alaskan wilderness with no memory, no belongings beyond an empty journal dated 1898, and a mirror reflecting a face that looks impossibly familiar. When he spots another man—his perfect modern-day double—hunting nearby, the truth begins to warp: time, lineage, and identity all collapsing into the same freezing landscape.

The waking man discovers his name: Wyatt.

His double: Travis Barlow, a husband, father, and the unwitting key to Wyatt’s past.

Wyatt believes he has survived since the Gold Rush, frozen in ice for over a century. When he insinuates himself into Travis’s life, memories rise like thawing artifacts—love, loss, obsession—and his fixation on reclaiming a life that slipped away becomes a creeping danger to everyone around him.

The Ancestor is many things at once:

•    a ghost story without ghosts
•    a frontier adventure threaded through time
•    a meditation on loss and legacy
•    a psychological unraveling trapped in a body that isn’t supposed to exist

Foreword Reviews praised the novel’s “vast, snowy, deadly wilderness,” while Kirkus likened it to Stephen King yet insisted Goldberg maintains “a flavor all its own—a distinctive mélange of the sincere and the strange.”

In audio, the novel is mesmerizing. Wyatt’s fractured memories, the hush of Alaskan wind, and the growing dread around the Barlow family become immersive elements that pull listeners straight into the cold heart of the mystery.

Slow Down: Noir, Narcissism, and the Hunger for Fame

Before The Ancestor’s supernatural edges, Goldberg cut his teeth on sharp noir, and Slow Down remains one of his most wickedly entertaining works.

Noah Spaeth is a struggling filmmaker who wants two things:

•    the avant-garde film he’s working on
•    and its captivating star, Nevie Wyeth

He wants both badly enough to betray the director, manipulate the cast, and let his ambition corrode every moral tether he has. When the director’s wife recruits him into a plot straight out of a James M. Cain fever dream, the book accelerates into a dizzying satire of art, ego, and the American desire to be seen at any cost.

The result is something between a Hitchcockian suspense story and a Bret Easton Ellis social critique: dark, funny, stylishly depraved, and disturbingly recognizable.

Foreword Reviews called it “a brilliant rush,” and Booklist couldn’t deny the pleasure of “watching rich snots destroy themselves.”

As an audiobook, the story becomes a confessional spiral—a young man speaking faster and faster as he loses control of the dream that once felt like destiny.

Orange City: A Dystopian Fever Dream Only Goldberg Could Write

With Orange City, Goldberg enters dystopia with a world so inventive, so visually surreal, that it feels like stepping into a Philip K. Dick hallucination built on modern anxieties.

The premise is extraordinary:

A secret city where the unwanted—felons, outcasts, the deformed, the broken—are given new identities, new jobs, new homes…on one condition: they can never leave.

The city is ruled by “the Man,” a monstrous figure suspended by robotic limbs like a mechanical arachnid, and his citizens obey him with religious fear. Advertising controls behavior. Sodas become addictive psychotropic triggers. Surveillance erodes free will. The Outside World is a myth designed to keep hope anesthetized.

When Graham Weatherend, a failing advertising executive, becomes addicted to a new beverage he’s been ordered to test, he begins to see the cracks in the illusion—and the truth behind Orange City’s impossible power structure.
This is dystopia not as metaphor but as nightmare: lurid, unsettling, and bursting with ideological bite. Reviewers drew comparisons to Ballard, Dick, and Kafka, but Goldberg’s voice is very much his own.

Cherry Hill Publishing’s audio edition heightens the claustrophobia, paranoia, and psychedelic dread. Listeners hear the city breathing, watching, whispering threats from the shadows.

Stalker Stalked: A Psychological Thriller with Ouroboros Teeth

With Stalker Stalked, Goldberg delivers a twist on the psychological thriller that feels both darkly comic and painfully modern.

Lexi Mazur is:

•    depressed
•    addicted to pills and alcohol
•    obsessed with reality TV
•    and an expert manipulator who has stalked two of her exes into relationships

But for the first time, she’s the one being stalked—by someone who behaves exactly as she does.

The brilliance of the novel lies in its reflexive structure: Lexi’s tactics, once her superpower, become the blueprint for her own terror. Is her stalker an ex? A friend? A celebrity she idolizes? A detective? Someone she doesn’t know at all?
The tension spirals with delicious symmetry as Lexi tries to out-stalk the stalker patterned after her own worst impulses.

Goldberg turns voyeurism itself inside out. In audio, Lexi’s voice—funny, desperate, unreliable—becomes the engine of one of his most entertaining thrillers.

Runaway Train & Grenade Bouquets: A 90s Coming-of-Age Duology with Raw Heart

Though known for psychological and speculative fiction, Goldberg also writes with remarkable emotional clarity. Runaway Train and its sequel Grenade Bouquets prove just how wide his range is.

Runaway Train follows 16-year-old Nico Sullivan, whose life detonates when her older sister dies of a brain aneurysm. Grief becomes gasoline, and Nico flees Los Angeles with a bucket list and a mixtape of 90s grunge, determined to reach Kurt Cobain’s house in Seattle.

Goldberg captures:

•    the aimlessness of adolescence
•    the ache of sibling loss
•    and the electric, dangerous hope of reinvention

The book is funny, aching, rebellious, and startlingly tender.

Grenade Bouquets picks up with Nico fronting a band, touring in a VW van, tasting early fame, and discovering that dreams don’t erase trauma—they amplify the fault lines beneath it.

Together, the duology feels like a VHS tape of 1990s youth culture: messy, musical, and unforgettable.

A Literary Mind That Refuses Boundaries

Lee Matthew Goldberg is not one author—he’s several, sharing a body:

•    the psychological thriller architect
•    the dystopian world-builder
•    the noir stylist
•    the supernatural experimenter
•    the emotional realist
•    the cultural satirist
•    the screenwriter
•    the literary advocate

His work appears everywhere from The Millions to Vol. 1 Brooklyn to The Montreal Review, demonstrating a flexibility that few modern authors can match.
In every medium, he is driven by the same engine: bold invention.

Nothing about a Goldberg novel is predictable—not its genre, not its emotional arc, not its structure, not its ending. And that unpredictability is precisely what makes his audiobooks at Cherry Hill Publishing so exhilarating.

Lee Matthew Goldberg at Cherry Hill Publishing

In audio, Goldberg’s stories become sensory experiences. His characters think aloud in intimate whispers. Dystopian machinery hums beneath the surface. Unreliable narrators lead listeners through funhouse mirrors of truth and delusion.

Cherry Hill Publishing brings out the cinematic qualities in his prose:

•    the psychological spirals
•    the hallucinatory visuals
•    the sudden reversals
•    the wry humor
•    the emotional truths that emerge from chaos

Among all the authors in the CHP catalog, Lee Matthew Goldberg may be the most original, the most daring, and the hardest to categorize—qualities that make him one of the most exhilarating voices to experience in audio.
He is a writer without borders.

A storyteller without limits.

A creator whose imagination keeps reshaping itself.

And in the world of Cherry Hill Publishing, he stands as one of the brightest, boldest, and most unforgettable literary forces.