When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she instructs her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.
At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other—Robey thinks he is off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldnesss, bravery, and self-possession.
Yet even that horse is no match for the brutality and senselessness of war, no surrogate for the courage Robey needs to summon in its face. It's in the center of that landscape, as witness to the lawlessness and carnage around him, that he is forced to raise a gun for the first time in his life. When he returns to his mother, Robey Childs will be the best a man can be, and the worst, irrevocably scarred by all he has seen—and all he has done.
When Robert Olmstead published his debut, River Dogs, he was compared to Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane. Since that time, Olmstead has received high praise for all of his work. But it's this book that is destined to become a classic. Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.
When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she instructs her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.
At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other—Robey thinks he is off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldnesss, bravery, and self-possession.
Yet even that horse is no match for the brutality and senselessness of war, no surrogate for the courage Robey needs to summon in its face. It's in the center of that landscape, as witness to the lawlessness and carnage around him, that he is forced to raise a gun for the first time in his life. When he returns to his mother, Robey Childs will be the best a man can be, and the worst, irrevocably scarred by all he has seen—and all he has done.
When Robert Olmstead published his debut, River Dogs, he was compared to Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane. Since that time, Olmstead has received high praise for all of his work. But it's this book that is destined to become a classic. Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.
"Robert Olmstead's fable Coal Black Horse is deft, moving, intensely readable, and just about tone perfect."—Richard Ford
When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable. She instructs her only child to retrieve his father from the battlefield and bring him home. Just fourteen and ill-prepared for the journey, Robey sets off wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety: blue on one side, gray on the other. However, it is the gift of an uncommon horse that changes Robey's destiny— a horse that becomes his only companion, guide, and protector.
As they plunge into a world of death and destruction, Robey is cloaked in the invincibility of youth. But the horrors of war, the truth of his own nature, and the inextricable connection between the two turn the boy into the best a man can be—and the worst, irrevocably scarred by all that he has seen and done.
This "powerful, redemptive narrative" in the tradition of The Red Badge of Courage is a brutally honest portrait of what war does to men and how it allows—even compels—them to love what they should hate.
"The Civil War turns a boy into a man in Olmstead's latest novel… [Olmstead] evinces a primordial universe: a time before gods, before mortality, a time in which war is as natural and inevitable as birdsong in the morning…Powerful and poetic."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A powerful, redemptive narrative."
– Publishers Weekly
"Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead's magisterial sixth book, is as sensate as poetry and forbidding as any squall, steeped in detail but bound by few storytelling conventions. I wondered, as I read it, if it might be classified as myth....Coal Black Horse is a remarkable creation."
—The Chicago Tribune
"Robert Olmstead is an original in the American grain. . . . From the world of his work—muscular and male—he has fashioned a fresh and vital language."—Tobias Wolff
“With his lush, incantatory voice, Robert Olmstead describes a boy thrust into one of the war's most horrific moments. . . gorgeous and moving passages”
—Washington Post Book World
“A spare, classical quest story . . . With a horse like this, you just want to ride, and with descriptive powers such as he displays here, Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one, with just enough lean prose to keep the mystery of an event both in time and out . . . and just the proper amount of sharp description to keep us bound to whatever piece of earth the particular moment of the story happens to be grounded in. . . . An effective mix of stark classic narrative and uncloying nostalgia.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Robert Olmstead is the author of five previous books and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant. He lives in Ohio, where he is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Distributor: Workman Publishing Company
Publication Date: 04-10-2007
Pages: 224
Measurements: 8.76in X 5.60in X .89in X .14lb
