A searing Southern Gothic ghost story unfolds in a blistering “love letter” to the Texas Hill Country
Palo Alto, CA – Debut author J. E. Weiner pens The Wretched and Undone (History Through Fiction, March 18, 2025). A Killer Nashville Top Pick for 2024 and Claymore Award Finalist for Best Southern Gothic.
This captivating saga blends real historical events with fiction as Weiner draws from her family history and lived experiences with the supernatural in the Texas Hill Country. The Wretched and Undone offers a fresh take on Southern Gothic with a unique and genre-bending dash of Texas Noir and the traditional Western – genres traditionally dominated by male authors – lifting up voices silenced and lessons still not learned.
On the eve of the Civil War, Polish immigrants Marcin and Agnieszka Anderwald arrive in Bandera, Texas, seeking a fresh start in a new land of faith, fertile soil, and freedom. But their dreams quickly become nightmares when Marcin provokes a sinister specter hell-bent on revenge. A battle ensues for the hearts, minds, and souls of the Anderwalds and their extended family of immigrant outcasts, Arab camel wranglers, wounded warriors, and a songstress on the verge of madness. As the generations unfold, each faces its own harrowing ordeal against unrelenting evil. Will the Anderwalds break free or remain forever wretched and undone?
[DISTRIBUTION DETAILS]
The Wretched and Undone
- E. Weiner | March 18, 2025 | History Through Fiction
Historical Fiction, Southern Gothic
Hardcover | 978-1963452105 | $33.95
Paperback | 978-1963452112 | $19.95
Ebook | 978-1963452129 | $9.99
J.E. Weiner is a writer and novelist based in Northern California. Her debut novel, The Wretched and Undone, is a searing and genre-bending Southern Gothic tale set in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and inspired by real people and actual events. The book manuscript was named a Killer Nashville Top Pick for 2024 and a Claymore Award Finalist for Best Southern Gothic.
Weiner’s previous work has appeared in the literary journals Madcap Review, Five Minutes, HerStry, and Chicago Story Press, as well as the recent grit-lit anthology “Red-Headed Writing” (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024). Weiner is a founding member of the Pacific Coast Writers Collective, and while living and writing in blissful exile on the West Coast, her heart remains bound to her childhood home, the Great State of Texas. Learn more about J. E. and her writing at her website.
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[ADVANCE PRAISE]
“A genre-bending thrill ride through Old Texas. Once in a while, a book catches you off guard with its depth, innovation, and storytelling. This is that book.”
– CJ Howell, author of The Salt Cutter
“A tale from a promising writer that grabs readers from the very first line!”
– Kirkus Reviews
[QUESTIONS]
Where are you from? Tell us a little about yourself!
I currently reside in Northern California, but I grew up in Texas, where, if I’m being honest, a piece of my heart still remains. My closest family lives in the Texas Hill Country, a ruggedly beautiful and compelling part of the world and where I draw inspiration for my fiction writing.
Tell us about your book? How did it get started?
The Wretched and Undone is a love letter, blistering as it may be, to the Great State of Texas. It is both a hard-nosed telling of tough truths and a poignant saga that explores the complexity and durability of family (found and otherwise). It is a story of the resilience, but not the infallibility, of the human spirit.
It all started with a story that surfaced from multiple sources and inspired the novel. Several witnesses described strange encounters with a mysterious woman in white on an old cattle ranch near Bandera, Texas. She would often come to call, drifting across the fields and hills or silently imploring sleepy guests for help, terrifying one and all. I soon learned that this woman, the likely victim of a murder-suicide at the turn of the 20th century, was no stranger to the ranch or the residents of Bandera. Who was she? What brought her to this desolate scrap of land? And why won’t she leave? Cue my decision to write this book: this is a story worth telling.
How do you create your characters?
The Wretched and Undone is a work of historical fiction that draws upon extensive primary and secondary sources, contemporary memoirs, and family oral histories to inform and shape the novel’s characters–those inspired by real-life figures as well as imagined on the page. There are no specific biographies here, but there are threads of many whom I have loved and lost among the book’s pages.
What inspires and what got you started in writing?
Amidst a hectic day job over many years, I often talked about writing this story, or some version of it. Talked about it for years, in fact. My husband finally tired of hearing me talk about writing, and signed me up for a Stanford Continuing Studies course titled “How to Write Your Novel and Keep It Going.” He sent me to class with a new Moleskine notebook and pen one winter night, and I never looked back. I wrote the first chapter that term, and the rest is history.
Where do you write? Is there something you need in order to write (music, drinks?)
For me, silence and solitude are the primary conditions for writing. I have the absolute luxury of a home office with a door. You will often find light seeping from under that door in the wee hours of the morning or night as I try to find those precious moments of quiet to put keystrokes to screen.
How do you get your ideas for writing?
I love to read old newspapers. Much of the material for this novel was accessible through online archives. I would scroll through pages of local news, pictures, advertisements, police blotters, birth announcements, and obituaries. This gave me a feel for the times and places in the novel. I also paged through countless memoirs, a real art in the late 1800s, especially for women. I am also a chronic eavesdropper and people watcher, and I made many trips to Bandera to listen and watch the world go by.
What do you like to read?
I love historical and literary fiction with dark themes and flawed characters. The darker and more flawed, the better. And throw in a bit of gallows humor, and I am sold. Two recent favorite reads include The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt and The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore.
What would your advice be for authors or aspiring authors in regard to writing?
Michael Crichton has it right: “Books aren’t written–they’re rewritten.”