James Wade Brings It Back Home With New Novel Hollow Out the Dark

James Wade does little to hide his down-home East Texas roots; at the book launch for his last novel, the award-winning Beasts of the Earth, he was at home in a cowboy hat and leather boots.

Nor does he hide his affinity for great literature, like that of Paulette Jiles, William Gay, and according to Wade, “the best to ever do it,” Cormac McCarthy – in whose footsteps he happens to be following as a second-year MFA student at Texas State. With full access to the giant’s archives, Wade notes, “You’re seeing early drafts that are not as good, or correspondence with editors and agents, where there’s uncertainty and doubt, and you can see that [he was] a person struggling with all of this too” – “this” being the stuff of life and getting published. It’s the kind of perspective that helped him prepare for the upcoming release of his fourth foray into the harrowing realm of the Texas Gothic novel, Hollow Out the Dark, out today from Blackstone Publishing.

But the intensive research required by Wade’s historical fiction isn’t limited to his new school’s extensive archives. For his latest offering, he hit up his undergraduate alma mater, Stephen F. Austin State University. In SFA’s digital archive, he found a thesis about East Texas moonshining toward the end of Prohibition, soon after the Great Depression had desolated the country. It’s an appropriately brutal American setting for an author looking to test the most extreme limits of his sometimes hapless, sometimes magnificent – often both – characters, who “have to choose whether they are gonna just curl up and let the darkness overwhelm them, or are they gonna ignore it completely and be naive and turn a blind eye to the ills of the world? Or is there this third option, where they hollow out the dark, find their place within this imperfect world and try to at least live a respectable, if not peaceful, existence? But, then, what is our responsibility to the world and to our society outside of our family?”

The book opens with daunting quotes from both John Steinbeck and the Book of Genesis, each reflecting the tangential conundrums of Hollow Out the Dark’s twin protagonists: a WWI “hero,” Jesse Cole, whose idyllic youth is laid to ruins – like the blood-soaked towns in Europe that claimed his soul and cursed his and his family’s future – and Amon Atkins, a true-blue Texas Ranger, who must choose between the ideologies of his idealistic but neglectful lawman of a father and the wants of a loving wife and a deaf-mute son.

Wade has inevitably been forced to reprioritize his own needs over those of his community, a possible byproduct of maintaining his own burgeoning family. Much like his tormented characters, he’s trying to find that happy medium within the moral quandary that is the human condition.

“This often seems to be a part of the moral conundrum for my characters, and I’m sure that’s because it’s often how I feel,” Wade says. “There are these simultaneous yearnings to be a) stoic and steadfast in the face of adversity, and b) completely lose my mind. The healthiest response is likely somewhere in the middle, extremism is never the answer – particularly this notion of extreme masculinity that promotes closed-off emotional unavailability and the need to respond to any threat with aggression and counter-threat. Violence begets violence and generations have suffered for it.”

Wade's deep dive into SFA’s archives proved fruitful. In fact, the firsthand accounts and regional histories he discovered were so rich and inspirational, he wrote his next book from the same treasure trove. His fifth foray into Lone Stare lore, Narrow the Road, takes place a bit later in the year 1932 and a tad further to the south of East Texas, thus keeping him closer to where he came from. He expects this novel – conceivably a venture into the genre of Western horror – will guide him back toward the vast open spaces of West Texas.

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James Wade appears at Vintage Bookstore & Wine Bar tonight (Aug. 20) at 7pm and BookPeople on Aug. 26 at 7pm.