David's career as a novelist developed concurrently with his comic-book writing career. David had been working at a publisher that went out of business, and a former coworker from that publisher became his agent, through whom he sold his first novel, "Knight Life", to Ace Books. Although the sale was made before he wrote any comic books, the novel was not published until eighteen months later, in 1987. The novel depicts the reappearance of King Arthur in modern-day New York City. Another early novel of his, "Howling Mad", is about a wolf that turns into a human being after being bitten by a werewolf. Ace Books hired David to write the "Photon" and "Psi-Man" novels, though they published them under the "house name" David Peters, over David's objections. David updated "Knight Life" years later when Penguin Putnam brought it back into print in 2003, and made it a trilogy with the sequels "One Knight Only" and "Fall of Knight", which were published in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Penguin rereleased "Howling Mad" and the "Psi-Man books" under David's actual name.