Wells wrote his first novel, Choose Your Own Adventure, when he was in second grade. He followed up with several novellas, a serial and a series of comic books when he was in high school. He finished his first serious novel when he was 22. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University, with a bachelor degree in English, emphasizing writing and editing.

Wells is best known as the author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, a horror novel published in the United States by Tor Books. It has been released in the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany, and will soon be published in Taiwan.

He also is one of the three authors (including Brandon Sanderson and Howard Tayler) that contribute to the podcast Writing Excuses.

Horror writer F. Paul Wilson described I Am Not a Serial Killer as a "dazzling, unputdownable debut" with a protagonist "as chilling as he is endearing." YA author Jack Heath praised it as having "plenty of thematic merit" in a review on his website. "All the characters are richly identifiable, including — and I can't stress enough how impressed I was by this — the serial killer," Heath said. "Wells is a first-time novelist, and yet he's already created a sympathetic villain, the holy grail of thriller writing."