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The Blood of Heaven, by Kent Wascom
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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.
- Sales Rank: #399729 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-06-04
- Released on: 2013-06-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
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. --Sarah Johnson
Review
—Shortlisted for the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction
—Longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction
—One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Summer Books of 2013
—A Spirit Summer Reading Pick
“When you read as many contemporary novels as I do, it's easy to get jaundiced, because we're awash in hype, and almost nothing ever seems quite as good as it's cracked up to be. So please know that I'm not just giving this young author a pass. I truly can count on the fingers of one hand the number of first novels that have ever excited me this much. Wascom made me think at times of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier and William Gay, but his vision is very much his own, as is his extraordinary voice. He's left himself a hard act to follow. This book is pure gold.”—Steve Yarbrough
“The young Master Wascom arrives at our gates wielding a narrative broadsword, speaking in a monstrous voice, a Louisiana visionary in command of an army of bones and by God he comes to conquer. It’s been more than a decade since the literary world has seen such a portentous debut from a novelist prodigy, equal parts savage and savant, and what else is there to say but All hail the future—this boy king has fifty more years of writing to feed our hungry souls."—Bob Shacochis
“Young Kent Wascom went down to the crossroads and there he made his deal. Or maybe he was just born spirited for this kind of work. Either way, I cannot name such a stunning debut as this one. It reads as not written, but lived and remembered—and how impossible is that? Whoever may own Kent Wascom’s soul, The Blood of Heaven will forever be ours.”—Robert Olmstead
“The Blood of Heaven is a brilliant comic rant that, with its twisted religious fervor, holds on to the reader and does not let go. Kent Wascom takes a nugget of colonial history—the Aaron Burr Conspiracy—and imbues it with a fiery life. His is a singular, important, and utterly vital voice.”—Sabina Murray
“In the present age of cultural strife and national re-definition, a brilliantly resonant novel blooming from America’s ever-thus history is just what the zeitgeist deserves. And The Blood of Heaven is as achingly beautiful in its personal story as it is savagely clear-headed in its national story. Kent Wascom has arrived fully-formed as a very important American writer.”—Robert Olen Butler
“Oh America, heart-broken and constantly fought over! The Blood of Heaven is a dark hymn to the ruthless and ruinous early days in the Louisiana fringes of our republic. In the tradition of As I Lay Dying and Flannery O'Connor and Blood Meridian, idiomatic and far off into transgression, this one, from Kent Wascom, bless his genius, is the real deal.”—William Kittredge
“Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentances shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.”—Boston Globe
“Rendered in lurid, swamp-fever prose swollen with biblical imagery (Burr first appears in the book on horseback, ‘hailed like Christ Himself’), the South of Mr. Wascom's imagination is an inferno of plague, vice and slave trafficking. . . . It's that dizzying pace, especially as Angel sets off on a Tarantino-esque rampage of revenge killings, that makes the book so compelling. Mr. Wascom's writing rolls from the page in torrents, like the sermon of a revivalist preacher in the grip of inspiration. You can't help listening, no matter how wicked the message.”—Wall Street Journal
“Though he’s not yet 30, Mr. Wascom has the gift, the elusive “it” that tells you on the first page that here is someone worth reading. . . . In its best moments, and there are many, you will slip completely into Wascom’s fictional world. . . . You will also be in the presence of a young writer whose talent is obvious, whose sense of narrative is classical and clear, whose understanding of the craft is deep and well-formed and will only get better.”—New York Journal of Books
“[Blood of Heaven] 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.”—New York Times Book Review
“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history. . . . [Wascom] creates a first-person narrator who speaks with fire-breathing eloquence, tormented by God and the Devil and equally conversant with both. . . . Wascom writes with a fire-breathing, impassioned eloquence. Angel’s voice compels our trust from the beginning and echoes all the ghosts of the dark Southern past.”—Washington Post
“If you thought the Wild West was wild, wait until you read about West Florida. In Kent Wascom’s stunning debut novel that territory serves as microcosm of a nation’s dark and violent infancy. . . . With its setting, its violence-driven plot and its resonant and often harshly beautiful language, The Blood of Heaven evokes comparison to the work of Cormac McCarthy. Its mordant humor and its exploration of slavery and violence as the tragic flaws at the heart of American history—as well as its awareness of what hellish danger awaits those who are sure God is on their side—recall such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain. Angel is a terrifying and irresistible narrator, and Kent Wascom is a striking new voice in American fiction.”—Miami Herald
“Wascom's West Florida makes the Old West look like a Disney resort in comparison, and his protagonist is a fitting emissary for this harsh and unforgiving land. . . . Whether describing a tender moment between husband and wife or a brutal revenge killing, there's no question of Wascom's range. . . . There is plenty here to applaud in this grim portrait of a dysfunctional frontier family caught up in a forgotten American war.”—NPR Books
“Kent Wascom, a 26-year-old Louisiana native, has produced an astonishingly assured debut. . . . He is more knowing than a writer his age has any right to be and displays a virtuosic command of biblical cadence and anachronistic vernacular without striking any false notes.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Wascom’s setting fascinates, while the veneer of violence makes us eager spectators in this narrative of American conquest and survival. . . . Ultimately, Wascom skirts around Faulkner’s Mississippi, O’Connor’s Georgia, and McCarthy’s divided interests of Tennessee and Texas to firmly plant his stake in America’s Deep South. It is a wise move. In Blood of Heaven, Wascom paints a fuller portrait of the American South. Though he makes strong overtures to these Southern writers and their territory, Wascom makes it his own.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
“Kent Wascom has written a rollicking historical thriller, a juicy love story, religious symbolism, a tale of woe, adventure, lust, manhood, money-chasing, nationhood, and religious and racial bigotry in early 1800s America. . . . Early American history was raw and gritty, and Wascom deals in that hard-boiled reality, but it’s balanced by a polished and eloquent prose style that has a certain Old Testament quality to it, which gives the tale its unique flavor and gravity. . . . Wascom engages America’s original sin with real force and seriousness; indeed, there are brutal passages that detail this incredible evil as the real-life horror show it was, and truly show America’s complicity in a moral abhorrence.”—Tallahassee Writers Association
“Sweeping themes of good and evil — along with colorful, visceral language and breakneck action — combine in this earthy tale.”—The Asheville Citizen-Times
“Angel Woolsack forsakes life with his itinerant preacher father to follow a daring highwayman, then ends up wending his way from on-the-edge West Florida to the bordellos of Natchez, the plantations of Mississippi, and finally New Orleans, where Aaron Burr is leading efforts to create a new country. It’s a brave and bloody new world, captured with energy.”—Library Journal
“The Blood of Heaven is sharply intelligent…extremely violent, constantly profane, darkly comic and very angry. . . .[But] the anger is rooted in moral outrage, so it’s on the side of the angels.”—Columbus Dispatch
“Though it says nothing good about America’s progress that we can still be seduced by a killer and slave-merchant with a coal-burnt silver tongue, this is precisely Wascom’s point. The myths of the founders are our myths, too, and they are myths that I hope Wascom continues to aim at.”—KGB Bar Lit Magazine
“In elegant, lucid prose, fiction newcomer Kent Wascom brings the frontier, in all its violence and disorder, to stunning life in The Blood of Heaven. . . . Wascom is not yet 30, but he infuses his story with a wisdom, awareness, and clarity well beyond his years. . . . Angel’s hold on us never wavers but intensifies. The Blood of Heaven proves Wascom is a trailblazer whose brilliance is not a one-off but a true and rooted fact.”—BookMagnet
“Set in the early part of the 19th century, Kent Wascom's debut novel is an evocative and searing read despite being bleak and peppered with scenes of extreme violence. . . . His voice is his own, unique and haunting. I know of no other author who can more completely transport his readers to the era he wishes to portray. . . . Wascom is an incredible talent.”—BookBrowse
“It’s gritty, visceral, and extremely memorable. It is a portrait of a time and era that is worthy of our attention.”—Shelf Awareness
“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 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.”—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
“Wascom’s language, gorgeous, expressive, and raw, flawlessly matches his vision of the unruly southern frontier before it latched onto the U.S. . . . 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.”—Booklist
“Angel Woolsack forsakes life with his itinerant preacher father to follow a daring highwayman, then ends up wending his way from on-the-edge West Florida to the bordellos of Natchez, the plantations of Mississippi, and finally New Orleans, where Aaron Burr is leading efforts to create a new country. It’s a brave and bloody new world, captured with energy.”—Library Journal
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, for The Blood of Heaven is a tale of fire and brimstone, the ballad of a man, and a nation, forged in a crucible of suffering.”—Financial Times
“An exceptionally eloquent and assured debut by a novelist who is still only in his twenties.”—Sunday Times
“Written in vivid hellfire-and-damnation prose . . . Wascom has already been hailed as an important new US writer.”—Metro
About the Author
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
49 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful Colors - Ugly Picture
By Gerard Webster, award-winning author
First the good news: Kent Wascom has a gift for language. The words he uses are vivid, alive, concrete, and colorful. His writing style is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. And he uses both the language and the style to describe life in the hot, humid, hellish frontier of 19th century Louisiana and Western Florida. As a debut novel for such a young writer, it is impressive. But I did not find it much to my liking.
First of all, the style of writing--while popular today--makes the reader work entirely too hard. Less than 10 pages into the book I encountered one sentence that was 163 words long. Also, the use of quotation marks is abandoned entirely. So it's up to the reader to decipher whether a character is speaking or merely having an internal monologue--and then figure out which character is speaking. Wading through 453 pages of this was like slogging through the landscape of the day: lush but dense undergrowth with mud, mosquitoes and plenty of distractions but no clear paths. An author may chose to ignore the accepted rules of grammar and punctuation, but he does so at the risk of losing his reader.
Finally, the characters in the book were not people that I would care to know. It's not necessary to make a character distasteful in order to make him or her unique. And when they're all distasteful in similar ways, none of them ends up being unique. Reading THE BLOOD OF HEAVEN was like viewing a painting in which the artist uses very vivid, bright, vibrant colors to portray an ugly picture of life.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Magnificent--a vivid cultural portrait of a fascinating historical period
By B. Case
"Blood of Heaven," by Kent Wascom, is an exceptionally powerful, violent, and disturbing historical novel about a little-known chapter in America's early frontier history: the failed Kemper Brother's Rebellion against the Spanish in West Florida in 1804. It also covers the brothers' subsequent involvement in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, a treasonous attempt to create an independent country in Louisiana and Mexico.
The novel opens in 1861 when Mississippi became the second state to seceded from the Union. A 75-year-old man is looking over his balcony at crowds celebrating in the streets. He's disgusted, angry, defeated, and overwhelmed by memories about his youth and his participation in the early political history of this region...and so the first person narrative begins. The old man becomes a boy of thirteen and the time falls back to 1799. The place is the tall grass prairie, a desolate wilderness of wretched pioneers living in holes dug out of the ground, far beyond the edge of civilization.
Told from the heart, revealing fascinating and complex psychological detail, the novel focuses on the inner life of its fictional main character, Angel Woolsack. He is portrayed as a fearless, self-assured, and morally disoriented man brought up to believe that whatever he does, he is acting as a direct instrument of God. Angel was raised by his father, an abusive, mentally unstable, and dangerous hellfire-and-brimstone evangelist. Together, they've been traveling the isolated frontier spreading the Gospel of Truth. The father is a religious fanatic who easily twists religion into an evil tool. As his disciple, Angel learns the skill of mesmerizing a crowd with the Word of Truth. He's a naturally charismatic leader and preacher. But from his father, he also inherits a distorted sense of morality.
Circumstances unfold that force Angel to flee his father and the frontier community in which they are living. He escapes with another young man, Samuel Kemper, the son of a rival traveling evangelist. The two become brothers at heart and eke out an existence in a lawless frontier. Eventually, they meet up with Samuel's older brother, Reuben, in the New Orleans area. After a rowdy "baptism of brotherhood" ceremony, Angel becomes an "adopted" Kemper brother and starts using the family last name.
At this point, the novel abruptly morphs from pure fiction into well researched, conscientious, and carefully imagined historical fiction. The novel begins telling the story of the Kemper Brothers and their 1804 Rebellion. The author artfully eliminates the third Kemper brother, Nathan, and substitutes his fictional character Angel. It is a brilliant plot structure; the author has managed to place his psychologically damaged, complex and compelling fictional character at the very heart of an authentic slice of early American history. The lion's share of the rest of the major secondary characters and their actions represent real historical figures and facts.
The novel is masterfully rendered in stunning, gorgeous, muscular prose; it frequently left me breathless. I often stopped to reread passages for better understanding or simply to re-experience the sheer beauty of the words. But I have to add that these words were not easy to read. In order to achieve a high degree of period authenticity, the author chose to create a unique style of narrative that is full of linguistic anachronisms. The text appears to be an artful mix of Eighteenth Century evangelical writing and modern Southern prose and slang. It needs to be read carefully to absorb the meaning, but it sounds delightfully authentic. It made me feel like I'd been propelled backwards in time. To read this novel is to experience what it must have been like to live around New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Natchez during those lawless and culturally significant times when America was coming of age and realizing its manifest destiny.
This novel is filled with a lot of lawless and morally impoverished characters that easily commit violence on each other. Slave trading and abuse figure prominently in the text and the N-word is used perhaps a thousand times. The book is often disturbing and punishing to read. But there is also a magnificent richness to the cultural details imagined by the author. In his skillful hands, the period and the people become real. That is the gift of this novel. It is a realistic portrait of a fascinating feral frontier in a small, often overlooked corner of a young America. It is also a complex psychological study of a flawed man at the center of an important chapter in the history of our country.
I recommend it highly. It is certainly one of the most important books I have read in a long time.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Wish we could give half stars as this is a 3 1/2 IMO.
By CrazyAboutBooks
Well. To Kent Wascom's family and friends, you should be proud. At 27 he has published a book written in the literary style favored these days for inclusion in literary journals. The prose is suited to the period being written about and is exemplary. And, he chose a period in the history of the founding of this nation that is rarely covered and he laid it bare, warts and all. No embellishing--no pretending like we had to do while attending school, but true realism. So, then, he is to be commended for that accomplishment.
As others have already noted, the main character, Angel Woolsack, is the son of a cruel and hypocritical preacher. While preaching fire and brimstone to others, he is employing most unusual punishments for his son (the coal really was unusual) and provoking earth dwellers to wage war against the Quakers. However, most of the book takes place after Angel breaks away from his father. By then, I was growing weary of the violence and ugly deeds in the book.
As Angel continues to grow up away from his evangelical father, he becomes a highwayman, he is put into the story of the 1804 Rebellion (Kemper Brothers), he becomes a slave master (the "n" word thrives in these pages), he frequents bordellos, he weds and has children, and even Aaron Burr and his rebellion plays a role. The book spans 50-60 years (I'm not good at math) in the life of Angel and along the way Wascom is mindful to insert valid historical details.
This is a well written, relentless book which if nothing else once again points out man's inhumanity to man even sometimes in the name of religion! And it may help explain such varied difference of opinion regarding religion to this day. After all, Angel had descendents (though he claims to have been gentler with his progeny than his own father had been with him) and those descendents have descendents and so on. Or it may simply be "free will" and Mr. Wascom could have choosen any historical period and inserted similar characters and the book would read similarlly. After all, we really don't change much do we? Anyway, the prose is indeed exemplary but dear readers, while not everyone will like each and every book written, just be aware that many may find this book to be interesting although unpleasant.
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