His work imitates the styles and themes of the 1930s pulps, most notably the historical fiction and fantasy of Texan author Robert E. Howard.
He graduated from Albert P. Brewer High School in 1985 and attended John C. Calhoun State Community College in Decatur, Alabama, where he studied English and History.
Oden began writing at the age of 14, and his first published work was a role-playing game called "Rogue Warrior" in 1986—only memorable, Oden says, for the artwork supplied by a teen-aged Cully Hamner.
It was followed in 2006 by Memnon and in 2010 with The Lion of Cairo, which mixed pulp-style action and sorcery with Crusader politics in Fatimid Egypt.
The third book in the trilogy, The Doom of Odin was published in December 2023[2] Oden identifies his writing influences as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Mary Renault, Harold Lamb, Karl Edward Wagner, and Steven Pressfield.