Hank Early Books in Order

Hank Early is the pen name of John Mantooth, a Georgia-born, Alabama-raised writer and teacher whose fiction lives where crime, horror, and Southern Gothic storytelling meet. He was born on December 17, 1972, and has said that time spent in north Georgia and Alabama, especially around family in the mountains, still shapes the way he writes about place, memory, and fear.

Place matters in his books.

He came to writing later than he wanted. In one interview, he said he wrote a story for a high school creative writing class, then did not write another one until he was thirty. He has joked about regretting the lost time, but those years also gave him material. Teaching, small-town life, family strain, and the shaky line between childhood and adulthood all show up again and again in his work.

He studied seriously too. Mantooth earned an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and later an MLS from the University of Alabama. Public bios have also identified him as an English teacher in central Alabama, which fits the grounded, everyday detail in his fiction. His books may lean dark, but they usually feel connected to ordinary people and recognizable lives.

Under his real name, he first built a following with shorter dark fiction, including Shoebox Trainwreck. Then came The Year of the Storm, his 2013 debut novel, a rural Alabama story about loss, belief, and the confusing space between what children imagine and what adults know. The novel was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, and it helped introduce the mix readers now expect from him: suspense, bruised hearts, and a hint that the world may be stranger than it looks.

He likes stories that leave room for the unexplained.

When he moved into crime fiction, Mantooth began publishing as Hank Early. He later explained that the name change came at his publisher's request, partly to give the new series a fresh start. Under that name he launched Earl Marcus with Heaven's Crooked Finger, then followed it with In the Valley of the Devil and Echoes of the Fall. Readers who click with these novels usually like the damaged investigator at the center, the Georgia mountain setting, the pressure of religion and family history, and the way old legends keep brushing up against real violence.

Across both names, his work keeps circling the same live wires: family love tangled up with harm, religion as both comfort and threat, small Southern towns packed with memory, and people trying to outrun what made them. He has said the religious fear in the Earl Marcus books was shaped in part by childhood memories of his grandmother's church in north Georgia. Even when the plots turn brutal, the books are most interested in what fear does to ordinary lives.

Today he remains closely tied to Alabama. Public author bios describe him as living there with his wife and two children, still teaching, still writing, and still moving between crime fiction and darker supernatural work. Whether the name on the cover is John Mantooth or Hank Early, the voice underneath is easy to recognize: plainspoken, tense, and rooted in the South.