Beasts of the Earth

I just finished reading Beasts of the Earth, and I am a bit unsettled with the ending; it wasn’t what I expected. But could it be anything else? I imagine it had to end that way, if it had to end at all. It was time.

If that fist paragraph seems a bit odd for a book review, it’s because that’s how my mind processes things after just finishing a book by James Wade. This author is more than a writer, more than a storyteller: he takes words—some simple, some not—and strings them together with an elegancy and purpose that a reader will seldom find anywhere else.

Beasts of the Earth is as thought-provoking as it is soul-provoking. Wade knows how to drive a blade of enlightenment deep into the reader’s imagination. And from that wound comes a trickling of astral ponderances that run rampant as the reader navigates the words and the meanings on the page.

This story follows the paths of Michael and LeBlanc. Although the two paths are told concurrently throughout the story, and although they are set apart by a number of decades, they ultimately come to one end. Michael is a child of the Louisiana swamps, and LeBlanc is an older adult who resides in Comal County, Texas. The only thing they seem to have in common is an unfair association with death; not the inevitability of their own demise, but rather the association of death in others.

“But the past is not a thing to sit still, and there are no new beginnings. The world itself was begun only once. And since that beginning its every rotation has depended on the one before—each circumstance born from the last.”

To say that this author is a master of description is a blatant understatement. Rarely have I read description that so easily seems to put the reader in the scene. For example, the author described a part of a decrepit farmhouse like this: “Weeds grew up through the porch and thick greenbrier vines snaked up the wooden frame of the structure. The paint was peeled and the cedar boards were sun bleached save for a small corner of the house where grew a Lampasas mulberry with its glossy leaves in the summer and its syncarp fruit in the spring.”

In another scene, a character is sitting down and hears a voice in his head. The author wrote, “The voice slithered into his ear.” In my opinion, that description warrants a little chill up a reader’s spine. (I write from experience here.)

But it’s not just description where this author’s brilliance shines; it’s also the dialogue. For instance, in one scene where LeBlanc is trying to break up a fight, he says, “Let’s just all take a step back and unload this gun before it goes off.” It worked.

Between the two storylines, the pacing is pretty constant. It’s a good pace. It’s quick enough to keep a reader engaged, yet slow enough to allow everything to soak into the reader’s imagination. I admit that I re-read several scenes just because they were written so well.

It’s hard for me to describe what kind of story this is because I consider it so unique. However, if Literary Fiction and Crime Fiction ever got together and produced an offspring, it would perfectly describe this story.

After reading only a few pages, I knew my imagination was in for a treat, and I wasn’t wrong. I’m just as sure that your imagination would be delighted to digest all the wonderful words and thoughts between the covers of Beasts of the Earth.