Neal Wooten steers his fire-engine-red Silverado up Sand Mountain, passing the snarling kudzu that threatens to creep onto the sinuous road that leads to his old stomping grounds in Blake, an unincorporated community of maybe 100 folks in northeastern Alabama’s DeKalb County.

“When we get to the top of the mountain, we are officially in Blake,” Wooten, who now lives in nearby Fort Payne, says. “I hope rush hour won’t be too bad.”

This is the 58-year-old Wooten’s neck of the woods, the place where he grew up, the place he so vividly recalls in his harrowing, heartbreaking memoir, “With the Devil’s Help.”

It is a story of poverty, abuse and a shotgun murder (committed by his grandfather), but also one of survival, forgiveness and finding a sense of peace and purpose.

The kind of story that most families don’t want anybody else to know, but one that Wooten, who has published more than 20 books, felt he had to tell.

“It dawned on me that this story would be a good story — I just didn’t know I was allowed to tell it,” he says. “When I was growing up, there were two topics that were taboo, and that was our home life and, of course, our grandfather. We weren’t allowed to talk about those things.

“I was 55 years old when I started writing this book, and even then, I’m thinking that I’m breaking some kind of secret covenant, you know,” he continues. “My dad and granddad had been dead a long time, but it was probably still gonna upset ‘em.’’

‘There is no normal’

The half-finished house at the end of the dirt road where Wooten and his three sisters and little brother spent much of their childhood is long gone, erased by the passing years.

But it remains present in Wooten’s memory.

Travis Wooten, his father, was an expert carpenter, Neal says, but he was never good at finishing what he started.

That’s why the house he started to build did not have any interior walls in the bedrooms, did not have any carpet on the floors, and did not have a bathroom.

“He was a dreamer,” Wooten says of his father. “He just never followed through with anything.”

So, as a boy, Wooten slept in a bedroom with no ceiling, and when he looked up through the exposed joists and saw the inside of the cheap plywood roof, his childhood imagination conjured up monsters that visited him in his dreams.

Since the house didn’t have any plumbing, either, Wooten and his sisters walked down to a spring every day to fill plastic milk jugs with water for drinking and bathing. When they needed to go to the bathroom, they used an outhouse.

Electricity, too, was a luxury only afforded them when Travis Wooten paid the power bill, which was infrequently. So, those unfinished interior walls were stained with the soot from the kerosene lamps they used to illuminate the dark.

Worse than all of that though, Travis Wooten, like his father before him, had a nasty mean streak, Neal says, and he was prone to fits of rage at the slightest provocation, such as that time 4-year-old Neal brought his dad a glass of water that wound up spilled and shattered on the floor when they botched the handoff.

Neal thought his father accidentally knocked it out of his hand, but Travis blamed his little boy and, as he often did, beat him with his belt — “the leather serpent,” as Wooten describes it in his book.

“Everything,” Wooten says, “was always somebody else’s fault.”

Later, after he was old enough to start reading grown-up books, Neal found refuge in Louis L’Amour westerns and in the science fiction of H.G. Wells.

“It never even dawned on me how much I read as a kid,” he says. “I don’t think my reading was necessarily because I was an avid reader as much as it was an escape.

“That’s why I like science fiction,” he adds. “I guess I needed to escape the planet.”

At the time, though, growing up dirt-poor and living with an abusive father seemed almost normal to Wooten. It was, to that point, all he ever knew.

“What I’ve learned in my life is this — and it took me five-and-a-half decades to fully appreciate: there is no normal,” he later wrote in the introduction to “With the Devil’s Help.”

“The only normal we will ever know comes from the perceptions created by our own experiences in our own little world.”

A knack for numbers

At Sylvania High School in DeKalb County, the short and stout Wooten was a defensive noseguard, offensive tackle and back-up kicker on the Owls football team and a first baseman on the baseball team.

But he excelled best at math, and he still has the trophy from that time he won first place and led his Sylvania High math team to victory in a tournament at Austin High School in Decatur.

It was, and still is, a proud moment.

“I’ve had days in baseball and football where you seem to be on a different level for some reason,” he remembers. “That was the first and only time in my life that I experienced that in academics. Everything was just so clear to me that day. I answered all of (the questions) and outscored everybody.”

So, after he finished high school in 1983, at the urging of the teacher who drove him to that tournament, Wooten attended Northeast Alabama Community College in Rainsville, then transferred to Auburn University, and eventually graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Auburn University at Montgomery.

He lived in Montgomery for 17 years, working a newspaper route, opening a fitness center and performing standup comedy on the side.

Then, he met the woman who would become his wife on a dating website and moved to Milwaukee to be with her.

“I mean, what would make a redneck leave Alabama?” he says. “There had to be a woman involved. So, that’s how I ended up in Milwaukee for 10 years.”

While living in Wisconsin, he put that college degree to work as the director of a math learning center.

Math, after all, always came easy to Wooten — it was one of the few good things he inherited from his father, who, Neal says, was a mathematical genius — but in middle age, he also developed a passion for writing.

At 43, he published his first book, the Christian-themed science-fiction novel “Reternity,” and subsequent titles included the legal thriller “My Brother, My Judge” and the futuristic adventure “The Balance.”

A dog lover who has a soft spot for strays, Wooten also created the comic series “Brad’s Pit,” about a man who adopts a pit bull from the shelter and their adventures together. A Spanish-language version of the strip, “Pancho el Pitbull,” became popular in South America.

Back home on Sand Mountain

In 2016, after a decade in Milwaukee, Wooten moved back home to the Sand Mountain area, where he lives with his five stray dogs in a commercial building he bought near the Fort Payne airport, about five miles from the site of his old house in Blake.

“Well, that was always the plan,” he says. “I mean, this was always home.”

The plan was for his wife, Maggie, to come with him to Alabama, too, but she got cold feet about moving to the South, he says, and decided to stay behind. They subsequently divorced after 12 years of marriage.

About four years after coming home, Wooten ran across an old newspaper clipping about his late grandfather, Pete Wooten, that had been posted on the DeKalb County, Alabama, Historical Group Facebook page.

In 1963, two years before Wooten was born, his grandfather was convicted of murder — later reduced to manslaughter by a judge — in the death of his son-in-law, Raymond Styron.

Pete and Raymond had gone in together on a get-rich-quick business venture, agreeing to split the profits of a potato crop, but after his son-in-law didn’t do any work and then cheated him out of his share, Pete became so enraged that he got shotgun and killed Raymond.

Pete Wooten was sentenced to 10 years in Kilby Correctional Facility in Mt. Meigs, outside Montgomery, but a couple of years into his prison term, he unceremoniously escaped by just walking away while mowing the warden’s lawn. He went into hiding, as Neal Wooten writes in his book, and managed to elude authorities until he died.

It was quite the Wooten family scandal, although one they rarely talked about.

When he saw that Facebook post decades later, Neal joined in the comments and mentioned that Pete Wooten was his grandfather.

“And boy, everybody started asking questions,” he recalls. “They wanted to know more about this potato murder.

“It finally dawned on me that I really need to tell the story because it’s going to be lost in time eventually, especially after me and my mom are gone.”

Wooten’s mother, Hazel, wasn’t wild about the idea of Neal digging up the family’s skeletons, but she came around and helped him fill in some of the blanks. (His father, whom Hazel eventually left, died in 2003.)

“I sort of hated he aired our dirty laundry in a book,” she says, “but not to the point that I didn’t want him to do it.”

‘Such a good feeling’

When “With the Devil’s Help” came out in September 2022, most of Wooten’s family — “90 percent of them,” he says — gave him a thumbs-up.

“Altogether, there’s probably about five relatives that seem to be pretty upset, and I don’t hear from them,” he says. “I hear from other relatives who have spoken to them.

“They seem to be a little perturbed about the book, and I’m not sure if it’s because they love Pete so much and believe he was innocent or it’s just that mountain code of, you don’t talk about family.”

The response from folks around DeKalb County has been affirming, Wooten says.

“If there’s anybody that doesn’t like the book in this area, I don’t know them,” he says. “People have been very supportive of all my books, but this one went to a next level.

“I mean, when schools start calling me up and want me to come speak, that’s just such a good feeling because I was not, you know, motivational speaker material when I was in school.”

Wooten even got invited to be the grand marshal of the town of Sylvania’s annual Christmas parade last year, at which time he was also presented a key to the town.

“I wish I could go back in time and tell that little (boy) about that because I’m sure he wouldn’t believe me,” Wooten says, referencing himself. “I wish I could go back and tell me that life gets better.”

There’s also talk of developing “With the Devil’s Help” into a 10-part miniseries, Wooten says, although the recent Hollywood writers’ strike waylaid any momentum on that.

At the Fort Payne Walmart, where Wooten’s mom has worked as a cashier for 18 years, she hears from people all the time who’ve read her son’s book.

“In fact, I had a customer the other day that told me she had already read it twice,” Hazel Wooten says. “I have a lot that do that.”

Lisa Brown, who lives in Blake and has known Wooten since they worked together at Kmart many years ago, says she couldn’t be happier for her old friend.

“Everybody is just tickled to death at his success, that he’s getting all this publicity,” she says. “We just love him.”

Neal Wooten’s memior, “With the Devil’s Help,” is available here.