April 1, 2003
Vengeance In My Heart:
A
Novel of the Civil War
by
David K. Moore
Reviewed by D. H. Rule
Cover blurb:
In 1863,
Confederate guerrillas raided Lawrence, Kansas, unleashing in turn a torrent of
revenge on western Missouri by Kansans and Federal soldiers. The author tracked
down dozens of eyewitness accounts of the raid and aftermath, from diaries,
memoirs, interviews, newspapers, and articles. This is the first true and
complete account of the Lawrence Raid, using only reported dialogue, written in
a novelized form. All characters and events in this book are real. A prologue
and epilogue are also provided for historical context.
Vengeance In My Heart is a book that lies somewhere
between a fictional novel and a non-fiction historical account written in
narrative style. Billed as a novel, the book nevertheless includes an
interesting and well-written non-fiction prologue that sets the historical stage
for the story of Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas.
The novel portion begins with the Missouri guerrillas gathering
to discuss and vote on the raid. The dialog is said by the author to be only
that which was documented to be the things the people actually said. While
historically intriguing, this tends to make the dialog somewhat more
stilted-sounding than you'd normally expect to find in a novel. The book also
diverts from standard novel expectations in that it focuses on no particular
characters in their stories. Instead, the book is written in largely an
omniscient point of view with little character development or exploration of the
internal workings and motivations of the individuals.
The story follows through the entire trek to Lawrence, and the
raid, in exacting detail through a series of vignettes. Through these scenes the
author builds up a picture of the entire scenario and the events of that
horrific day. The people of the town are the most clearly drawn as
individuals--undoubtedly because the preponderance of accounts comes from this
source--while the guerrillas often fade into nameless, faceless, drunken thugs.
The guerrillas would kill brutally, or spare with polite kindness, in a way that
to the people of Lawrence struggled to fathom:
Such casual and random acts of unbelievable violence
would be repeated over and over. The citizens were at wits end. One group would
ride up and tell them they had nothing to worry about, only to be followed by a
drunken gang totally unable to restrain themselves. A random act of kindness,
such as a child giving William Gregg a rose, could spare the home and family.
The wrong answer, or even no answer at all, would end in murder.
Though sometimes awkward in the writing, and not what you might
expect of a standard fictional novel of the war, many scenes of Vengeance In
My Heart stayed with me for quite some time after reading them, and gave a
better overall picture of the events of these intense days in history. This book
makes an interesting and worthwhile addition to the history of this region.
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From the webmasters of Civil War St. Louis...
Noted Guerrillas and, the extremely rare,
A Terrible Quintette
on a searchable CD-ROM:
Click here for more
information and to order
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