“Novels this savage and soulful come along rarely, but In the House of Wilderness delivers both elements in spades. – Andrew Hilleman. The novel begins as a man named Wolf wanders through the Appalachian South with two “wives,” Winter and Rain. Rain wants to escape against the will of the charismatic and wrathful Wolf. When she meets Stratton Bryant, a widower living alone in an East Tennessee farmhouse, she begins to plot an escape likely to end in violence.
”In the House of Wilderness may be Charles Dodd White’s finest achievement to date. This is a story that at once moves and lingers, well-paced but dripping with the language we've come to expect from his pen. Line for line, White is one of the most talented writers at work in the American South.”—David Joy. “Charles Dodd White writes with grace and beauty, and In the House of Wilderness delivers with a resounding blow, as he skillfully balances that which lies beneath and that which shows its sometimes courageous and sometimes brutal face. Each sentence is a melody that carries you with care from the first word to the last.”—Michael Farris Smith. “Charles Dodd White’s In the House of Wilderness examines loyalty, exploitation, and loss in language so finely wrought that the novel eventually becomes a prose poem. Bringing together with a thriller-like intensity the themes and lyricism that have defined his early work, this book is not only beautiful, compelling, and haunting. It is necessary and important. This is what we mean when we talk about serious fiction.”—Mark Powell. Born in Atlanta, Charles Dodd White served in the Marines and earned his undergraduate degree and an M.A. at Western Carolina University, his MFA at Spalding, and his PhD at Texas A & M-Commerce. He has taught in Asheville and is now is on the English faculty at Pellissippi State College near Knoxville. He is the author of two previous novels and a short story collection.
Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2018. 246 pages. Hardback in dust jacket