JAMES WADE
​​​Award-winning author James Wade blends atmospheric prose with soul-stirring themes in Hollow Out the Dark, a gothic adventure set against a Depression-era landscape where a whiskey war threatens to decimate a small Texas town.
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A veteran of the Great War, Jesse Cole is grateful for the quiet life he now leads. But when his closest friend runs afoul of local criminals Frog and Squirrel Fenley, Jesse is forced to spin his moral compass and enter a violent and volatile underworld. There he encounters corrupt lawmen, hired assassins, and a dark family secret that will upend all he once knew.
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Complicating matters are Texas Ranger Amon Atkins--who arrives to investigate the Fenleys just as their empire is threatened by a deadly new competitor--and the green-eyed, raven-haired Adaline, a love Jesse thought he'd lost forever.
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With resources scarce and winter falling hard on the town, a desperate Jesse must choose between the law and the lawless and find a way to survive while still protecting the people he loves.
A heart-pounding tale full of plot-twisting revelations, Hollow Out the Dark brings readers into a whiskey-fueled world where everyone has a secret, and love everlasting balances on the edge of a knife.
"James Wade is a poet of the dark. With gorgeous lyricism, he writes of men and women caught in the bleakest of circumstances and the choices that must be made when desperate times require desperate measures. It's been forever since I read a novel so stunning in its language and so moving in its effect. Read this book and prepare to be amazed."
-- William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land
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"Narrative prowess and atmospheric prose echo the works of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy, resulting in a rich, character-driven story."
-- "Deep South Magazine"
"Hollow Out the Dark is a major achievement in Southern noir, a Prohibition-era crime epic that is at heart an affecting exploration of brotherhood in its many forms. With lyrical prose and sly period dialogue, James Wade builds a propulsive narrative that explodes with revelation. A haunting read that lingers in the memory long after the final page."
-- "Scott Von Doviak, Edgar Award-nominated author of Lowdown Road and Charlesgate Confidential"
"A war-for-whiskey Western in a small Texas town with prose that sings like Cormac, Woodrell, and Walter Hill formed a boy band. James Wade has packed a wallop of a gothic gut-punch about discovering where one's moral compass may land while spinning in a Depression-era storm of violence, corruption, and the hardest of times."
-- "Mike McCrary, author of Someone Savage and the Remo Cobb series"
"In Hollow Out the Dark, James Wade's latest Southern-gothic feat, Wade stitches a propulsive tale with Biblical thread, fueling it with whiskey, tucking secrets beneath the floorboards, and draping the Depression-era landscape with suspense. Wade builds himself a well-deserved seat, pulling it to the literary table to sit alongside the likes of Ron Rash, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy."
-- "Robert Gwaltney, author of The Cicada Tree, and Georgia Author of the Year"
"With addictive prose and a style all his own, James Wade delivers another powerful read. Part Western, part Southern lit, part thriller, part mystery, part character study set in rural East Texas in the 1930s, Hollow Out the Dark is a mesmerizing story, dark, raw, and original."
-- "Johnny D. Boggs, nine-time Spur Award winner "
"If John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy have a present-day successor, it must be James Wade. As intoxicating and robust as its subject matter, Hollow Out the Dark is a Prohibition-era tale that poignantly reminds us although times may change, the human spirit remains frighteningly and unflinchingly the same. Wade distills language with the artistry of an expert craftsman and the fearlessness of a bootlegger.At once heartbreaking and hopeful, this book cements Wade's growing stature as a standard-bearer of Southern-gothic literature while proving yet again that he is one of the most distinctive voices of our time."
-- "Rudy Ruiz, award-winning author of Valley of Shadows and The Border Between Us"
"In Hollow Out the Dark, James Wade casts a cold East Texas landscape in all its grim glory, reflecting the hearts of the men who battle for their piece of it. This prohibition-era Western is no simple tale of bootleggers and lawmen but a meditation on morality in which even the good must choose their own corruption. Wade imbues poetry, philosophy, and craftsmanship in his prose. From story, to scene, to sentence, his care is present in each word. A joy to read."
-- "Caroline Frost, award-winning author of The Last Verse and Shadows of Pecan Hollow"
"James Wade's newest novel, Hollow Out the Dark, is a masterpiece of atmospheric crime fiction; a worthy successor to the likes of William Gay and Cormac McCarthy. Set in East Texas, it is an epic, and age-old, story of greed and generational betrayal--where vengeance is swift and forgiveness a long time coming."
-- "Kathleen Kent, New York Times bestselling author of Black Wolf "
"With his characteristic insight and imagination, James Wade takes us to another era and makes it tremble with authenticity. The manner in which Wade sees life so clearly, even in the dark, creates a psychology of characters carefully wrought. Wade's distinctive lyricism threads the narrative and his pitch-perfect rendering of the biome of the piney woods throbs with metaphor, running through the novel like a river, clean and clear."
-- "Lucy Griffith, WILLA Literary Award-winning poet"
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Winner of the 2023 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best Contemporary Novel
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A Southern Review of Books Pick for The Best Southern Books of October 2022
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A Deep South Magazine Pick for Fall/ Winter '22- '23
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A Richland Library Pick for Six New Books for October
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Beasts of the Earth tells the story of Harlen LeBlanc, a dependable if quiet employee of the Carter Hills High School's grounds department, whose carefully maintained routine is overthrown by an act of violence. As the town searches for answers, LeBlanc strikes out on his own to exonerate a friend, while drawing the eyes of the law to himself and fending off unwelcome voices that call for a sterner form of justice.
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Twenty years earlier, young Michael Fischer dreads the return of his father from prison. He spends his days stealing from trap lines in the Louisiana bayou to feed his fanatically religious mother and his cherished younger sister, Doreen. When his father eventually returns, an evil arrives in Michael's life that sends him running from everything he has ever known. He is rescued by a dying poet and his lover, who extract from him a promise: to be a good man, whatever that may require.
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Beasts of the Earth deftly intertwines these stories, exploring themes of time, fate, and free will, to produce a revelatory conclusion that is both beautiful and heartbreaking.
"Beasts of the Earth is a leanly structured western, stripping the genre only to its most basic elements. This allows Wade’s prose and philosophical ideas room to shine...a powerful ode to dreaming, beauty and human goodness."
-- Deep South Magazine
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"Wade returns with another stark and chilling tale...From reptiles in the swamp hunting prey, to reptilian men, cold and calculating, beasts feature in this disturbing novel...The prose is beautiful."
-- Library Journal
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"Wade's pitch-perfect, personality-driven dialogue sings in the voice of life, and his ability to meld existential thought, situational metaphor, and cinematic setting is a full-bodied experience...A soul-deep exploration of a wounded man in crisis, James Wade's Beasts of the Earth...secures his position as an author of extraordinary merit."
-- New York Journal of Books
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"...contemplative character development and evocative descriptions of the landscape..."
-- Publishers Weekly
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"The story brilliantly weaves together an ephemeral whodunnit with a transcendental puzzle about god and death. James Wade is a master of blending plots in this manner, and this his third novel is a masterpiece. Wade's prose is lyrical, telling a story with a three part harmony of action, metaphor and imagery. The novel's plot is a haunting ballad of evil and an atonement that is as fleeting as it is obscure...All of Wade's language in Beasts of the Earth is melodious, playing on each page a song that grips a reader's heart and soul...The anticipation makes it impossible to stop turning pages until the end. But there is no "needlessly shocking" conclusion, as one misguided reviewer suggests. For the novel's appropriate closing, the story's music just fades away, leaving it to the reader to decide, in true literary form, the reckoning. Few modern novelists have Wade's literary agility, and Beasts of the Earth will certainly delight sophisticated readers."
-- Midwest Book Review
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"All Things Left Wild was one of my favorite novels of the last two years, as was River, Sing Out. But neither of those novels could have prepared me for the dark and compelling vision of Beasts of the Earth. I found myself rooting for the characters throughout their near-Biblical tribulations, and the storyline kept me turning the pages, desperate to find out what would happen next. Here we have a novel that blends realism with existentialist philosophy to redefine contemporary Southern fiction. Don't miss this tour de force of modern literature."
-- David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Spur and Anthony Award-winning author of Winter Counts
"Like Flannery O'Connor, James Wade explores what it means to be human--our capacity for good rivaled only by our capacity for evil, our weakness alongside our urge for redemption and grace--with gloriously complex characters and gorgeous prose. Beasts of the Earth is a beautiful gut-punch of a novel."
-- Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas
"James Wade is a writer of exceptional talent and this novel is his latest entry toward his path to greatness."
-- Scott Semegran, award-winning author of The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island and host of Austin Liti Limits
"James Wade writes a terrific story, but that isn't what makes him so good. Wade is a craftsman. His books should be read slowly, to luxuriate in his word choices, his sentence structure, his character revelation. That is why he is a joy to read."
-- James L. Haley, Spur Award-winning author of the Bliven Putnam Naval Adventures
"James Wade's Beasts of the Earth delivers on the promise of his first two novels with this scorched-earth tale of a solitary innocent struggling against the unrelenting misery of a rural community in the American South who believe him to be a degenerate criminal. Reminiscent of early McCarthy, Larry Brown, or the great Tom Franklin, Wade uses two timelines to weave this intricate story that culminates in a most satisfying crescendo of honor, violence, and the only kind of justice some folks ever get. It's his depictions of noble suffering that strike deepest--I'll be thinking about young Michael Fischer, a boy struggling to hold together that last fragments of his humanity, for a long time. James Wade has all the tools, imagination, and more than enough passion to be at the vanguard of the best Grit-Lit writers of his generation, and I'll be reading whatever he puts out."
-- Matt Bondurant, bestselling author of Oleander City and Lawless
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Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
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A Barnes & Noble Pick of Favorite Indie E-Books of 2021
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A Deep South Magazine Pick for Summer Reading
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Attempting to escape his abusive father and generations of cyclical poverty, young Jonah Hargrove joins the mysterious River -- a teenage girl carrying thousands of dollars in stolen meth -- and embarks on a southern gothic odyssey through the East Texas river bottoms.
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They are pursued by local drug kingpin, John Curtis, and his murderous enforcer, Dakota Cade, with whom River was romantically involved. But Cade and Curtis have their own enemies, as their relationship with the cartel controlling their meth supply begins to sour.
Keeping tabs on everyone is The Thin Man, a silent assassin who values consequence over mercy.
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Each person is keeping secrets from the others -- deadly secrets that will be exposed in savage fashion as their final paths collide and all are forced to come to terms with their choices, their circumstances, and their own definition of God.
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With a colorful cast of supporting characters and an unflinching violence juxtaposed against lyrical prose, River, Sing Out dives deep into a sinister and sanguinary world, where oppressive poverty is pitted against the need to believe in something greater than the self.
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Winner of the 2021 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best Historical Novel
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Winner of the 2021 Reading the West Award for Best Debut Fiction
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A Mayor's Book Club of Austin, Texas, Selection
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A Barnes & Noble Pick of Best Indie eBooks of 2020
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A PopSugar Pick of Compelling Historical Fiction Books
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After a botched robbery, sixteen-year-old Caleb Bentley is on the run with his mean-spirited older brother across the American Southwest at the turn of the 20th century. Caleb’s moral compass and inner courage will be tested as they travel the harsh terrain and encounter those who have carved out a life there, for good or for ill.
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Wealthy and bookish Randall Dawson, out of place in this rugged and violent country, is begrudgingly chasing after the Bentley brothers. With little sense of how to survive, much less how to take his revenge, Randall meets Charlotte, a woman experienced in the deadly ways of life in the West. Together they navigate the murky values of vigilante justice.
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Powerful and atmospheric, ALL THINGS LEFT WILD is a coming-of-age for one man, a mid-life odyssey for the other, and an illustration of the violence and corruption prevalent in our fast-expanding country. It artfully sketches the magnificence of the American West as mirrored in the human soul.