Forget angry bears or hunters’ stray bullets.

Accidental tragedies are the least of concerns in the northern Minnesota backwoods of Wayne Johnson’s latest novel, “The Devil You Know.”

In the fictional wilderness of this former Lawrence writer, humans are tracked by the only prey evolved enough to hold a grudge: other humans.

The fast-paced book is at once a page-turning, psychological thriller and the extraordinary coming-of-age story of its central character, 16-year-old David.

David goes on a canoe trip in Minnesota’s remote Boundary Waters with his younger sister, Janie, and his estranged father Max. The journey turns sour fast when hot-headed Max argues with a quartet of campers who ridicule his canoe.

What Max and his family don’t know is that these campers are running from the law. Knee-deep in a theft ring at a Minnesota meat-packing plant, the men have fled north after being implicated in the assault of a Mexican immigrant worker who’s likely to die from his injuries.

Max’s fatal error is condescending to the one man among them who seems to have no conscience — a thick-bodied candidate for anger management named Penry.

“You couldn’t understand the sole of my (expletive) shoe,” Max tells Penry.

And Penry doesn’t forget.

Wayne Johnson, author of The

Truth as creepy as fiction

Seeking vindication and fearing the family has learned too much about them, the men decide to track and, if necessary, silence them.

David is away from the campsite when the men find it and attack, leaving both Janie and Max brutally wounded. But David saves their lives, killing one man in the process, and then escapes under cover of darkness — the outlaws always a half step behind — on a journey that tests his mental and physical limitations.

Perhaps the creepiest thing about Penry, arguably the most calculated evildoer in the novel, is that he’s based on a real person.

“I had an experience with a kind of strange character out in the woods back then,” Johnson says of the early 1970s, when “The Devil You Know” is set. “Let’s just say that he was really a dangerous character and gave us all the heebie-jeebies.”

Many of the characters in Johnson’s fifth book are modeled after people he knew, including a friend’s father who spent days as a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic and nights beating his son. He became part inspiration for Max.

Although the book drips with violence, Johnson handles it matter-of-factly, without drawing out the gore. Dealing with such savagery is nothing new for the author.

“Let’s say this: I had some really rough experiences when I was a kid,” he says. ” By the time I was 17 or 18, a few of my friends had either been murdered or died. One guy had his head blown off with a shotgun, and another guy had his eye poked out with a pool cue. … so I’d seen it myself.”

Bears, wildfires and J-strokes

Johnson has set all five of his books in Minnesota, where he spent his boyhood taking hunting and fishing trips on the northern rivers and lakes and later worked as a guide.

So he didn’t have to do a lot of research to make genuine the water and wilderness passages in “The Devil You Know.” Nor did he have to look any further than his own experience to recreate most of the survival skills.

“We had some disasters out there in the woods for sure; everyone does,” he says. “One time I capsized a canoe in a rapids in icy water in late April and almost drowned.”

Johnson was deep in the wilderness when an enormous wildfire started, and he once spent a lonely night on a tiny island trying to avoid a bear on the mainland. He can J-stroke a canoe and negotiate rapids with the best of river guides.

So his adventurous book — minus the bloodshed, of course — came straight from his own life. That’s why it’s a tad frustrating when people ask if he drew inspiration from James Dickey’s “Deliverance.”

“I found echoes of what took place in that book taking place in mine, but none of it derived from that book whatsoever,” he says. “This is all my own experience. In fact, I have a helluva lot more experience with this kind of thing than Dickey ever did.”

‘Full-throttle’ book

“The Devil You Know” reads with a kind of velocity created by Johnson’s intentionally long sentences that dare readers to take a breath.

“My intention was to make the book run,” he says. “I wanted it to have this forward lean, propulsion, for the narrative itself to have a sense of action, of movement, a kind of almost breathlessness.”

One can’t help but think when reading that the novel would make a great movie.

“I like to hear that,” Johnson says. “Someone’s in the process of selling it to Hollywood right now.”

When he’s not cranking out novels, Johnson, who moved from Lawrence to Salt Lake City in December, teaches fiction and screenwriting. In fact, he’s teaching the latter this summer at Wichita State University.

He lived in Lawrence with his wife, Karen, for nearly eight years while both taught at Washburn University in Topeka. Johnson has studied with the likes of Jane Smiley, James Alan McPherson and Madison Smartt Bell.

He wants people to know his latest novel is a riveting but deep read.

“It’s an elemental, full-throttle kind of book that takes off letting you know who the people are and from there on just picks up speed,” he says. “But secondly, all that kind of character complexity is there — voracity of character, interesting insights into dysfunctional families and the nature of violence and evil.”