THE BLACK HARVEST

A young Southerner watches his father die at the hands of Union soldiers and vengefully enters the Civil War in this historical drama.

As the story opens, Missourian Zechariah Ashby Marchbank feels “conflicted about everything: the war, slaves, Jehovah, and what part I was to play in it all.” Then the Civil War shows up at his door in the form of a gang of Union fighters known as Jayhawks, who hang his dadright in front of him. As a result, Ashby soon decides to join a band of guerilla fighters—nominally, he does so to defend Missouri against Union soldiers, but primarily he joins the group as an exercise in revenge.Debut author Dean captures Ashby’s thirst for violence in powerful prose that’s typical of this often sharp-edged work: “I’d never felt so bloodthirsty as when I thought about [Jayhawks leader] Jennison and how I wanted to kill him. I’d already killed him a thousand times in my dreams in as many creative ways.” Under the command of the brutal Col.William Clarke Quantrill, Ashby and his cohorts, which include future notorious outlaws Frank and Jesse James, ride through Missouri and Kansas in search of Union men. However, as they do so, Ashby fears for his own life—not only because of the recklessness of the crew that he’s joined, but also because of their horrific savagery, which is sometimes directed toward members of their own ranks. In a framing device, Ashby relates his story to John N. Edwards, an ambitious “son-of-a-bitch journalist,” as the protagonist puts it, who’s looking to rewrite history and help himself professionally.

Over the course of this book, Dean deftly limns a picture of the war in which Confederate and Union partisans commit unspeakable atrocities, driven by a lust for destruction. Once Ashby is pulled into the war, he finds it nearly impossible to withdraw from it—but it’s a combination of necessity and venomous anger that keeps him in, not an attachment to a particular ideology or principle. However, Ashby does note that while the infamous Quantrill and his men would be “mostly reviled and nearly forgotten by history,” Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who committed similarly rapacious acts, would be hailed as “a great man, a heroic figure, who had only done what needed to be done to avoid more bloodshed.” Ashby is a complex protagonist—for all his wounded anger, he seems incapable of fully surrendering to it, too self-aware of the damage that his losses have imposed on his soul as he feels his reserves of empathy fully deplete. Dean’s writing also offers a striking brew of poetry and punch, combining unflinching realism with delicately woven imagery. Although the portrayal of the war is as historically rigorous as it is dramatically affecting, the real core of the novel is Ashby’s inner conflict as he tries to salvage some vestige of his humanity during this “time of violence.”

A remarkable tale of war and its ghastly ramifications.