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Summary
Summary
One of the most powerful and impressive debuts Grove/Atlantic has ever published, The Blood of Heaven is an epic novel about the American frontier in the early days of the nineteenth century. Its twenty-six-year-old author, Kent Wascom, was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, and this first novel shows the kind of talent rarely seen in any novelist, no matter their age.
The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher's son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.
The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.
Author Notes
Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans in 1986, and spent his childhood in Louisiana and Pensacola, Florida. He attended Louisiana State University and received his MFA from Florida State University. In 2012, he won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, judged by Amy Hempel. Wascom lives in Tallahassee, Florida. The Blood of Heaven is his first novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Making brilliant use of a little-known chapter in America's history, Wascom's gripping debut captures the pioneer spirit, lawlessness, and religious fervor of the Southern frontier. In the Louisiana Territory in 1799, teenaged Angel Woolsack and his abusive, hellfire-preaching father encounter their equals: preacher Deacon Kemper and his sons. Deacon also deals in guns. Angel becomes blood brother to Samuel Kemper and the two elude their fathers and flee to Natchez, where they alternate between preaching and armed robbery. "I believed crime was spiritual, robbery an act of faith.... In the process, both parties were brought close to God," Angel says. Eventually they reach the Spanish-owned region known as West Florida, where Angel continues to engage in mayhem and the murder of agents of the law. In time the brothers become involved in Aaron Burr's treacherous attempt to create an autonomous empire in Louisiana and Mexico. Angel is a hugely flawed hero, mixing biblical cadences with a Southern lilt, and pulsing with violence, religious hysteria, and sexual tension. Weaned on biblical prophecy and an angry deity, he's unable to resist taking vengeance upon those who oppose him, believing his behavior to be God's will, and Wascom's visceral descriptions of slaughter are not for the fainthearted. Yet Angel is also devoted to his pistol-packing bride, Red Kate, and to his handicapped son, and the forces that shape his character and destiny are clear. While Angel is fictional, the Kempers were real figures, legendary for their ambition. In its depiction of a primitive, savage era and of man's depravity, as well as its sensitive portrayal of souls "drowned in the blood of Heaven," Wascom's novel is a masterly achievement. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Fueled by whiskey, vengeance, warped religiosity, and wild revolutionary zeal, a golden-haired ruffian and his two adopted brothers aim to fight their way to nation-building glory. Wascom's language, gorgeous, expressive, and raw, flawlessly matches his vision of the unruly southern frontier before it latched onto the U.S. The son of a Baptist preacher from Upper Louisiana, Angel Woolsack inherits his father's biblical eloquence and violent tendencies and not only wields them with equal dexterity but liberally intertwines them. From Mississippi River flatboats to a Natchez whorehouse, his picaresque travels shape his mind-set and introduce him to Samuel and Reuben Kemper, his partners in crime. His wife, Red Kate, a young woman carved from the same mold, is a similarly powerful presence. For Angel, the West Florida territory, nominally ruled by the Spanish, is an opportunity to be grabbed, as are Aaron Burr's dreams of forming an independent country. Seeing early nineteenth-century America through the eyes of an ambitious, trigger-happy renegade makes for an exhilarating yet brutal ride. Wascom imbues this underexplored era with visceral authenticity.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
As American frontier tales go, Wascom's debut has a fairly unusual setting: the Mississippi River Valley before its annexation early in the 19th century. The narrator, Angel Woolsack, is the son of an itinerant minister he calls Preacher-father, a man driven by religious zeal into the punishing wilds of Missouri, young Angel in tow. This life of privation ends in the first of the novel's many episodes of gory bloodshed. Within the first hundred pages Angel has become a street preacher with an amoral relationship to God, and a member of a ragtag outfit of thieves. He has fathered a child who dies before birth, buried the child's drowned mother and murdered his own father. Though Wascom's prose is less resonant, he will be compared to Cormac McCarthy - his novel is rife with biblical overtones, laconic psychopaths and violence so frequent and exaggerated it becomes a punch line. Certainly, the book entertains with its energetic language and fast-paced action, and the love story between Angel and his wife is moving in its you-and-me-against-the-world naïveté. Wascom's research is put to good use as the gargantuan forces of history squash Angel and his associates. The territory disputes and political machinations leading to the Louisiana Purchase - in which "trash is set against trash" - figure prominently in Angel's (mis)fortunes, as does the slave trade, which proves a pox on his life. In the end, neither of these considerations, nor Angel's bond with his wife, lends him enough depth to save him from overused motifs about pioneer life, masculinity and violence. Ayana Mathis is the author of a novel, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.
Kirkus Review
Violence is the one constant in this bombastic first novel about frontier adventurers in the American South at the start of the 19th century. That violence came early for Angel Woolsack. His father, an itinerant preacher, punished the boy by having him suck live coals. The narrator/protagonist will find a friend, though, in another preacher's son, Samuel Kemper, a big lug 10 years his senior. Only 14, Angel impregnates a convert's daughter, who is drowned by her scandalized mother. Angel then strikes his father dead with the shovel used to dig the girl's grave and is saved from a lynching by Samuel, who whisks him away on horseback. Angel sees him as his brother, taking the Kemper name. From Missouri, the "brothers" drift south, and Angel turns criminal, with Samuel his accomplice. He mugs drunken merchants while praying for their souls; a gun-toting, Bible-brandishing daredevil. In Natchez, Miss., he's ready to mate with an equally violent young whore. Red Kate, 14, axed to death the Creek Indians who had kidnapped her; she now works for a fearsome madam. "We're children of desolation," Angel declares to Kate. This rhetorical flourish substitutes for character analysis; the biblical resonance of Wascom's prose helps mask the implausible action. Angel buys Kate from her madam, and the two move to West Florida, still administered by the Spanish. In this lawless country of slavers and hucksters, there will be firefights, ambushes and reprisal killings; Angel, failing to understand that revenge is a dead end and God owes him nothing, discards his Bible. Enter Aaron Burr, the disgraced vice president. Wascom miscalculates by trying to fit his freelance backwoodsman into a historically grounded power play. The star-struck Angel loses his autonomy to become a tiny, uncomprehending cog in Burr's machine, and the novel sinks into a quagmire of shifting historical alliances. A debut that has a certain mad zest but is seriously hurt by its lack of a trajectory.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Wascom's debut novel elucidates the messy nature of nation building on the early American frontier. Set mainly in West Florida (comprised of parts of current-day Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) around 1800, the book follows Angel Woolsack through his transformation from preacher to robber to freedom fighter to hero for independence from Spanish rule as Angel joins his adopted brothers in the effort to free West Florida. Aaron Burr features as a fascinating and enigmatic character involved in the ongoing plotting. Ideals of manifest destiny mask the violence and internecine warfare, which is more about settling scores than about freedom. The struggle between wealthy slave holders and populist leaders like the Kemper brothers makes the novel an interesting examination of class warfare. Angel develops insight when he becomes blind and then is blinded to the suffering of others when his sight returns and he becomes a black-market slave dealer. VERDICT This highly readable saga is both charming and intense. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian meets Devils Dream by Madison Smartt Bell. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/12.]-Henry Bankhead, Santa Clara Cty. Lib., CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.