Photo by Jasmyne Ray.
Two books authored by John Mantooth, who writes under the pseudonym Hank Early: “In the Valley of the Devil” and “Heaven’s Crooked Finger.” The third and last installment of the Earl Marcus series is set to come out in November 2019.
John Mantooth may spend his days at Calera Middle School as a teacher, but early mornings, weekends and vacations are all spent writing. The Hoover author, who writes under the pseudonym Hank Early, said his students don’t really know about his second occupation.
“There have been some students in the past that have come into my class with my books and said, ‘Hey look what I found,” but it’s usually the John Mantooth books,” Mantooth said. “They really haven’t made the connection to the pseudonym yet, which I’m really OK with.”
Mantooth began writing as Hank Early after the poor performance of one of his early novels, “Year of the Storm.” From there, it became difficult to publish anything else under his name. Mantooth, his agent and his publishing company, Crooked Lane Books, came to the conclusion that a pseudonym was needed and worked together to find the best fit, deciding on the name Hank Early because of its southern appeal.
“Hank Early has performed much better than John Mantooth ever did,” Mantooth said with a laugh.
Mantooth’s love and talent for storytelling came early. As a child, he would often entertain his sister with stories he made up and revel in the “high” that came with getting a reaction out of her.
“Even as a kid, I imagined myself being a writer one day, but I was much too immature to ever sit down and do it,” he said.
It wasn’t until he turned 30 and had his first child that Mantooth decided if he was going to be a writer, it was time for him to give it a shot. He wrote a draft of a novel as a novice but was unhappy with it and didn’t attempt to get it published. After a second attempt at writing a draft, he attempted to get it published but it didn’t attract any attention.
At 34, Mantooth took a step back and decided to try his hand at writing short stories. He joined an online writing community called Zoetrope, where writers post their work for other writers to critique and offer suggestions.
“I posted some stories on there and got some good feedback on them and people seemed to like them, and so that gave me confidence,” he said. “So I continued with the short stories and just forgot about novels for a while.”
Before turning 40, he returned to novels and wrote “Year of the Storm,” written under his real name and published by Penguin Books. The novel was the first of three novels in a series about main character Earl Marcus and was nominated for a Bram Stoker award, but it performed poorly in sales.
After taking on the pen name Hank Early and switching publishers, Mantooth published “Heaven’s Crooked Finger,” the second novel in the series of Earl Marcus books. He describes them as “history crime” but with some horror aspects, with some readers having commented their surprise at how scared they got while reading.
The third and final installment of the Earl Marcus series is set to come out in November 2019, and Mantooth said so far he’s completed a full first draft. When beginning a new novel or story, he said, he usually starts with a setting.
“Setting is really important to me, and all of my stories and my books have kind of started with the idea of a place,” he said. “When I was thinking about these books, I was thinking about the mountains in north Georgia because that’s where my parents are from and where my grandparents live, and I spent a lot of time there as a kid.”
