Dennis McFadden

Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road: A Novel in Stories, won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. His first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010; another collection, Lafferty, Looking for Love, was longlisted for Regal House Publishing’s 2021 W.S. Porter Prize. His novel, Old Grimes Is Dead, earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, and was selected by their editors as one of the Best Indie Books of 2022. Over a hundred of his stories have appeared in publications such as The Missouri Review (including the winner of the 2023 Perkoff Prize in fiction), New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Antioch Review, Arts & Letters, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Best American Mystery Stories, and in the inaugural volume of the new series, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he was awarded a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in 2018.

Download and read the first story, “Jimtown Road,” from Jimtown Road: A Novel in Stories

Praise for Jimtown Road

In all my reading experience, I don't remember ever coming across a collection of linked stories that could also be classified as a page-turning mystery thriller, but this is exactly what the wickedly talented Dennis McFadden has achieved in Jimtown Road. It is sure to be considered one of the year's best. 

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Heavenly Table and The Devil All the Time

Stepping onto Jimtown Road begins a satisfying, if unsettling, journey across generations in the fictional town of Hartsgrove, Pennsylvania. In exquisite prose, Dennis McFadden fills the pages of these skillfully crafted linked stories with love, hope, death and danger. They offer an unblinking look, illuminated with burning intensity by the ever-present moon, at the darkest parts of the human heart. Peopled by very real and flawed characters who feel like anyone’s own neighbors and friends, I found myself at the end of this book aching to return as soon as possible. I strongly urge everyone to visit McFadden’s Hartsgrove. You will not leave disappointed.

—Ray Morrison, author of In a World of Small Truths and I Hear the Human Noise

With the artfully linked story collection, Jimtown Road, Dennis McFadden lured me to a sun-gold hilltop, and then pulled me into the thick, dark woods. He led me—breathless, heart thumping—over winding country roads and, driving too fast into the night without headlights, up and down the streets of Hartsgrove, his fictional—yet so real—small, Pennsylvania town. I followed him into dim taverns and dusty antiques shops and the lonely homes of his bruised and (sometimes) resilient characters. These stories, these characters, this town inhabit me like an ache, like an exquisite yearning. There is so much need in these pages. Need for security, revenge, love, apology, intimacy, belonging, escape, power, peace. These needs are like the small town neighbors of Hartsgrove: they are always there, always in one another’s business, always weighing on the choices made and their consequences. As I moved with McFadden from one story to the next, the ghosts of each tale (those girls, those poor little girls) followed me, haunted me. They haunt me still.

—Patricia Ann McNair, author of The Temple of Air