He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).

[9] James' first novel, John Crow's Devil (2005) – which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication[10] – tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957.

[16] James's most recent work, Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) is the second in a planned fantasy series which began with Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019).

Lilith hates the masters, but much of the novel deals with how she "aspires to obtain a privileged stature within plantation society by submitting to the sexual subjugation of a white overseer, Robert Quinn".

"[25] James's 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, portrays "a passionate, often angry account of postcolonial society struggling to balance identity and a burgeoning criminal element.

[28] She explains: "James's rejection of a purely nationalist tradition, like that of other authors in his cohort, concretizes his critique of the ways nationalism distracts us from the increased deregulation of global capital and its production of material inequality around the globe.

This disruption of privileged tropes in the interest of turning attention onto the transnational forces that structure inequality helps to explain James's use of 'a poetics of excess.'

[30] It has been described by NPR journalist Ari Shapiro as "an epic fantasy quest — full of monsters, sex, and violence, set in a mythic version of ancient Africa.

"[31] According to TIME magazine, the novel "joins the ranks of those by authors like Tomi Adeyemi and N. K. Jemisin, whose works push back against stereotypes about the types of figures who 'should' appear in fantasy fiction.

In his popular 2015 essay "From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself", published in the New York Times Magazine, James describes reading Salman Rushdie's novel Shame (1983): "Its prose was so audacious, its reality so unhinged, that you didn't see at first how pointedly political and just plain furious it was.

[35] James's work carries a unique style, often referred to as disturbing, brutal, and violent, leading him to be compared in one review to Quentin Tarantino, who is known for his excessive use of violence in his films.

His style strays from traditional and expected Caribbean literature by "creating wild and risky new possibilities for thinking about the region's place in our contemporary reality.

The conflicting nature of how readers and reviewers respond stems from reactions to the often upfront brutality juxtaposed with the mechanical elements that James uses to tell his stories.

"[28] When reviewing The Book of Night Women, another critic explains: "Rape, torture, murder and other dehumanizing acts propel the narrative, never failing to shock in both their depravity and their humanness.