Novelist · Screenwriter

I write about people caught within systems larger than themselves—and the small decisions that quietly change everything.

Larry Rubenstein writes across autobiography, literary fantasy, literary noir, and architecture—work grounded in human experience and attentive to the moment an ordinary life changes course.

Explore the works

Selected works

Four books. Four distinct worlds.

Autobiographical novel · Based on true events

A Coward’s Hero

A Coward’s Hero is an autobiographical literary war narrative tracing an eighteen-year-old Marine’s 1967–68 tour in Vietnam—from Chu Lai to the Tet Offensive in Da Nang—where the mythology of heroism gives way to the cold logic of survival.

Initially a flamethrower operator, he is reassigned to a battalion operations bunker near Da Nang. From this position—both participant and observer—he witnesses the war’s cynical machinery: maps are altered, patrols are staged for appearances, and success is reduced to empty metrics. After surviving a night abandoned in hostile jungle during Operation Pitt, he increasingly understands that chance governs life more often than courage.

Running through it all is the Marines’ dark, irreverent humor—the jokes, barracks absurdities, and small acts of defiance that allow frightened young men to remain human inside a system indifferent to them.

Returning home physically intact but psychologically altered, he struggles with an enduring hypervigilance. Rejecting traditional tales of valor, A Coward’s Hero examines the uneasy, uncelebrated burden of having simply survived.

Based on Larry Rubenstein’s service with the 2/7 Marines in I Corps and told with unsparing honesty.

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Adult literary fantasy

The Forest That Screamed

In a kingdom where corruption has taught people to value power over truth, the heroes are not warriors but artisans—a woodworker, a potter, a chandler, and a smith. Their magic is awareness, and the central artifact is not a sword but a hole carved in wood that reveals the unbearable truth.

As the land’s buried grief awakens in the form of a primordial serpent, people who make things must confront a system that knows only how to break them. This is the literary fantasy of how a kingdom died—and how a quiet craftsman’s truth saved the world from the grief it refused to see.

The novel grew from Larry Rubenstein’s friendship with fine woodworker Roger Deatherage, whose devotion to craft—listening to the grain and shaping only what the wood allows—deeply influenced his architecture, his writing, and his approach to life.

Literary noir · Crime drama

The Five-Dollar Variable

A five-dollar pinch flat changes the course of Lorenzo Thorne’s life. Forced out of an endurance cycling race along the Baja California coast, he stops beside a remote beach and discovers the body of Alessandra Moretti. Already at the scene stands Arturo Valladares, a compromised federal investigator who warns Lorenzo to walk away. Certain he would never stop wondering what really happened, Lorenzo stays.

His decision pulls him into the orbit of the Morettis, a powerful coastal family whose wealth and influence are entwined with organized crime. Authorities will call Alessandra’s death an overdose. The small-caliber wound at her temple says otherwise. With Arturo beside him, Lorenzo finds himself caught between Alessandra’s intelligent, controlled older sister, Cassi, and Vargas Beltrán, the ruthless fixer charged with containing the fallout before it spreads.

Their search leads from fogbound beaches, working docks, and veterinary laboratories to the private rooms of El Infiernito, a nightclub where criminal influence and respectable society comfortably overlap. With help from veterinary student Elena “Leni” Solano, they retrace Alessandra’s final hours and discover that the effort to shape the story of her death began long before her body reached the beach.

What first appears to be a murder with a single answer becomes a confrontation with a self-protecting system—one that disperses guilt across acts of panic, loyalty, mercy, and self-preservation until every participant is both culpable and insulated. Lorenzo is left to face Baja’s grimmest truth: the system survives not by burying what happened, but by arranging it into a version the survivors can live with.

A completed novel adapted as a six-part television limited series.

Autobiographical novel · Architecture

Elegant Simplicity

In late-1970s Houston, a broke, bruised, and barely licensed architect acquires a crumbling property in the city’s forgotten Sixth Ward. With his left hand in a cast and little more than stubborn vision, he sets out to design and build his first office—helped by Roger, a gifted woodworker pursuing the perfect chair, and Mary, a grounded art teacher who sees through everyone’s pretensions.

Together, they create something beautiful from scraps—part building, part bond. Elegant Simplicity is an autobiographical novel about architecture, friendship, failure, and the fragile structures, emotional and literal, that hold us up when everything else begins to crumble.

A love letter to human hands, honest mistakes, and the grace found in making something that matters. Currently available on Amazon.

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For the screen

Stories extended into film and television.

The Five-Dollar Variable

Six-part limited series. The pilot follows Lorenzo’s discovery on the Baja coast and the uneasy partnership that begins when he refuses to ride away.

2026 Austin Film Festival Second RounderDrama Teleplay Pilot · Top 25% of more than 12,500 submissions

A Coward’s Hero

Screen adaptation of the autobiographical novel, developed from the lived events behind the book.

A Serpent’s Kiss

Feature screenplay.

Maybe It Will Rain

Seven-part miniseries in development.

About Larry

A life lived across disciplines and continents.

Larry Rubenstein is a novelist, screenwriter, retired architect, endurance cyclist, and U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines.

His autobiographical novel, A Coward’s Hero, has received more than 675 reader reviews. Its screenplay adaptation won the top award at the 2024 Depth of Field International Film Festival and was a finalist at the 2024 Cambridge Script Festival. His short story “N.Y. Pinball” appeared in Shades of December in 2001.

His other work includes the literary noir novel and six-part limited series The Five-Dollar Variable, whose pilot was named a 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder in the Drama Teleplay Pilot category, and Elegant Simplicity, reflecting his career in architecture. At its heart, The Forest That Screamed is a quiet homage to craft and devotion, to the truths revealed by the materials we work with, and to the man whose influence helped shape his life.

Rubenstein spent more than a decade living and traveling throughout Southeast Asia, experiences that continue to inform the cultural texture and moral ambiguity of his fiction. He now lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Other novels What Remains Intact and Crash Dummy.

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