The Other Side: A Novel of the Civil War

Although McColley is being compared to Michael Shaara, his prose shows a far greater debt to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner in this powerful novel of the bloody Missouri-Kansas border wars. There is, however, nothing derivative about the style or the story, whose originality and brilliance of composition leaps forward. Jacob Wilson, a hapless teenage farm boy in southern Ohio, becomes embroiled in the developing conflict when his parents agree to hide two fugitive slaves, a black man and his daughter, with whom Jake falls in love. When hostilities begin, Jake's father goes off to fight with McClellan. Meanwhile, vicious militia sergeant Everett McGown invades the Wilson farm and brutalizes the boy and his mother while searching for the runaways. Jake murders McGown and flees into Kentucky, where the sergeant's ghost haunts him and drives him further west into the disputed territory of the border country. There, Jake joins a band of bushwhackers led by ""Bloody"" Bill Anderson and quickly adapts to the life of a raider, brigand, pillager, murderer and thief. For the next four years, with side-kick Haywood, a simple-minded, freakish but devoted boy, Jake is burdened by McGown's spirit, which appears to him in various forms of advancing decay, and he sinks ever deeper into the darkest reaches of depravity, witnessing and participating in heinous acts and depredations that leave him questioning his sanity and his capacity for human feeling. Told with meticulous attention to historical detail, the story unfolds in inexorable waves of grotesque and often macabre violence. While there are occasional inconsistencies and the prose is often unnecessarily repetitive, this is a stunning novel. In McColley's (Praying to a Laughing God) sure hands, the raped and charred landscape of Civil War Missouri is a lyrical vista, a devastatingly rendered surrealist backdrop for all the horrors of war. Agent, George Nicholson, Sterling Lord Literistic. (June)