Darker Angels

"Stories within stories within stories! And always, it took another story to explain the one that preceded it." That's the structure of Somtow's richly textured novel of supernatural sacrifice and redemption set during and just after the Civil War. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the British widow of the Reverend Grainger (whom she mistakenly believes to have died in the war) attends the New York viewing and there meets Walt Whitman. He has a tale to tell, which involves Civil War atrocities, dark magic and some vivid resurrections. And he's just the first of a series of storytellers (among them Marie Laveau, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, a voodoo priestess, a one-eyed slave who can raise the dead and a young veteran of Andersonville) who gradually reveal the Rev. Grainger's secret life, and the secrets of undead immortality, to the hitherto sheltered young widow. Author of Vampire Junction and a werewolf novel, Moon Dance, Somtow here deploys zombies and a were-leopard in a story that makes good use of period detail and gory voodoo atmospherics. - Publisher's WeeklyWhat a rich and diverse tapestry is S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, a dark novel of the Civil War that's told as a phantasmagorical series of stories within stories like concentric rings. There's really no way to do justice to its structure in this brief description, but it must be said that such a potentially intrusive device here causes no confusion and indeed takes nothing away from the desperately grim beauty of the words that make up each and every narration.From the strange beginning, in which the recently widowed Mrs. Paula Grainger meets Walt Whitman while clandestinely visiting the body of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, to the whirling, wild, wonderful stories of the war later told by Whitman and his young friend, Zachary Brown, and then the stories told by those within the stories ... about the elderly voodoo prince, Old Joseph, who as a free slave raises black Union soldiers from the dead for one last skirmish, and the boy preacher who may have killed his own father, Jimmie Lee Cox, and Tyler Tyler, the young soldier with no arms, and bewitching Phoebe, the voodoo priestess who holds the power to transform herself into a black panther, and finally re(folding) back onto the Reverend Grainger--whose correspondents include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and the President himself, and who is not at all quite the way his wife thinks him to be.This is a novel of transformation, of being, of death, and of living the true life that only the grimness of death can bring. It's a novel less about the Civil War than about all wars, but it is quite specifically a Civil War novel, in which the richness of the themes runs like blood spilled between brothers and comrades, masters and slaves. This novel is grotesque, yet it makes such wise statements about the grotesqueness of war and slavery and religion that its own gruesomeness seems not only natural but necessary. Composer and film-maker S. P. Somtow weaves together so many disparate narrative voices yet produces a single cloth of intense beauty and rage, in which inhumanity vies with love as the fiercest of emotions. A novel such as Darker Angels cannot easily be described--it has to be experienced. It's a mystery to me that this great work of literature--yes, literature--will slip between the cracks because of its macabre subject matter. Perhaps too many critical voices need to stop paying attention to labels and focus instead on the heady work beneath this attractive cover. If you missed the first printing, by all means treat yourself to a special order--this trade paperback edition will fit easily on the shelf next to the Poe, Whitman, and Byron to which it so intriguingly refers. A true masterpiece of historical fiction, Darker Angels sings with a grim joy rarely achieved by novelists who dare touch subjects such as these.- Chi Weekly