“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“James Wade is a writer of exceptional talent and this novel is his latest entry toward his path to greatness.”

“James Wade really impressed me with his latest release, Beasts of the Earth. It’s written in the style of great, serious fiction and called to mind tales of the modern West by writers like Cormac McCarthy and playwright Sam Shepard…Wade certainly has a way with the written word and creates images and moods of this small Texas town that become so vivid in the mind’s eye…Harlen LeBlanc is destined to go down as one of the great characters in recent fiction. I cannot recommend this exhilarating and soul-filled novel strongly enough for those who don’t believe that modern literature can hark back to the days of writers like Steinbeck.”