Beasts Of The Earth, by James Wade

Literary agility.

There are two timelines in Beasts Of The Earth. The one from the past, which begins in 1965, follows the boy Michael Fischer’s escape from his abusive father Munday after horrific events suffered by Michael and his sister when Munday comes home from prison. The second is closer to the novel’s present, which begins in 1987 and ends three years later. It follows Harlen Leblanc through a harrowing time that begins with the murder of a young woman at the school where Harlen works. The stories created by these timelines take place in alternating chapters divided into three parts and come together in the third part in a conclusion that aptly combines the end of a thrilling plot with a gut-wrenching doubt about whether the evil experienced by the characters in the novel will ever be extinguished by goodness.

There are two mysteries in Beasts Of The Earth. Who killed the Harper Girl? And who sits waiting at the end of your life to judge you? 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.

Wade takes the reader on a journey from the innocence of youth through the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air toward a reconciliation on the horizon. The story is dark at its lightest point. A theme of foreboding begins in the first chapters, when Wade employs some of his beautiful phraseology, “And yet his past still belonged to him, dragging along behind him like a great linked chain, becoming heavier with every step, and LeBlanc forever feared the day when the chain might cease its extending and jerk him backward into his reckoning.” Passages like this one are frequent throughout the novel. The metaphors and allusions to physical actions are laced together brilliantly. Even at the time of the death of the old man that Michael witnesses, Wade uses a compelling juxtaposition of imagery and metaphor relating to birth and death, referring to “the springtime meadow of the soul” where there blows a “never-ending breeze” on which the old man in death will go “into the marveling . . .and find peace where it is.” 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.

Toward the end of the story, Wade alludes on several occasions to a boatman calling for coins, which signals a looming moment of reckoning .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 s will certainly delight sophisticated readers.

For more about James Wade, visit his website at https://www.jameswadewriter.com