A Novel · September 12, 2026 · East Nashville Press
Where the Heathen Rage
“The baby was still alive when Hollis Koker found her stuffed inside a hollow log on the side of Little Black Mountain, screaming into the dark.”The first line
In a coal town where the trains have stopped running and the union line is the only thing holding men together, Hollis is already living on the edge of extinction. The strike has taken his work. The mountain is being picked clean. Faith shouts through the night from a windowless church where men handle serpents and promise salvation in fire. All he has left is the small, fragile life he shares with his wife, Anna, in a hand-me-down house with two chairs at the kitchen table, just the two of them against the world.
Anna calls the child a miracle. Hollis calls her a burden.
But in a place where the past is never buried, the abandoned baby draws together lives that were never meant to meet: a teenage girl with a secret she cannot outrun, a zealot preacher drunk on power and prophecy, a sheriff who believes order is the same thing as justice, and a people who have survived for generations by clawing a living from the mountain’s black heart.
As violence gathers and old reckonings rise to the surface, Hollis must decide what can be saved and what must be sacrificed.
Where the Heathen Rage is a fierce Southern novel about inheritance and redemption, the wages of faith and the cost of love, and the fragile, stubborn hope that survives when nearly everything else has been taken.
Where to find it
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“A mesmerizing novel… Campbell’s prose is a joy to read.”Independent Book Review
“Richly cinematic. Immersive small-town America novel boasts riveting sense of place.”BookLife
“At turns brutal and compassionate… the stubborn endurance of hope.”Peggy Kurkowski, Independent Book Review
The soundtrack
The jukebox at the Bobcat Den
The novel names its own music. There is a jukebox at the Bobcat Den and a battery Zenith pulling WAXM in off the back side of the mountain, and across them the book names Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, Sammi Smith and Lefty Frizzell — and Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache,” which Micah plays in a scene that tells you everything about her.
There is a Pentecostal church band that sounds like a chainsaw, a B3 organ through a whirling speaker, and a megaphone on a picket line leading a call and response that scans like a work song.
Campbell recorded four albums for Columbia and Warner Bros. before he wrote any of it.
Questions
The short answers
When does Where the Heathen Rage come out?
September 12, 2026, from East Nashville Press, in hardcover, ebook and audio.
What kind of novel is it?
Country noir — Southern literary fiction in the tradition of Donald Ray Pollock, David Joy, Daniel Woodrell and Ron Rash. It is set in a Virginia coal town during a mining strike and it does not look away from violence.
Where is it set?
Lee County, Virginia, in the coalfields. The book names real geography: Bonny Blue, Big Stone Gap, WAXM, and the coal companies that worked the seams.
Do I need to have read anything else first?
No. It is a standalone novel.
Where can I read the first chapter?
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