Max Hawthorne Books in Order

Max Hawthorne is an American writer whose work moves between creature thrillers, horror, memoir, and investigations of strange reports from the natural world. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended Central High School before earning a BFA from the University of the Arts.

His road to publishing did not begin in a quiet writing room. Before his fiction career, Hawthorne spent more than two decades working in the health club business, including time as a trainer and salesperson. That job gave him a close view of the characters, bad deals, and odd behavior that can gather around a gym.

He turned those experiences into Memoirs of a Gym Rat, his first published book in 2013. Part tell-all and part cautionary guide, it uses stories from behind the front desk and in the locker room to look at the messier side of fitness culture. The book is frank, funny, and not especially interested in making the industry look tidy.

Then he turned to the sea.

Hawthorne had been developing the idea behind Kronos Rising for years before it reached readers in 2014. The novel follows Paradise Cove sheriff Jake Braddock and marine biologist Amara Takagi as a supposedly extinct ocean predator turns a Florida coastal town into a danger zone. The premise lets Hawthorne combine his interest in marine life with the fast, high-pressure setup of a monster thriller.

The series grew through the bridge novella Plague, the origin story Diablo, and the three-part Kraken storyline. In those later books, the threat widens far beyond one town. New leads, military research, submarines, ancient pathogens, and increasingly dangerous creatures carry the story into a harsher, more science-fictional version of the same oceanic nightmare.

The ocean is never just scenery in these books.

Hawthorne's interests outside fiction feed directly into his work. He has written about cryptids, historical marine sightings, large sharks, and other mysteries in Monsters & Marine Mysteries, a nonfiction collection built from research, interviews, and investigations. He has also written The Sleigh, a supernatural horror story that moves his taste for monsters and escalating danger to Christmas-time New York City.

Hawthorne has described himself as a longtime angler, outdoorsman, and collector of fossils and antiquities. He has also spoken about living in the Northeast with his family and cats, which, he has joked, can make a simple morning cup of tea harder to finish. Across his books, the common thread is clear: people face things that should be impossible, usually with the water, darkness, or an old legend closing in around them.