Coal Black Horse
- ISBN13: 9781594132377
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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 t… More >>
Olmstead’s writing technique is to shred an unabridged dictionary, mix it with corn, feed it to a coal black horse and declare the processed matter a book.
Rating: 1 / 5
Coal Black Horse is an endless parade of extravagantly descriptive words, many of them obscure, with very few of them actually progressing the story. The book has been carelessly compared with The Red Badge of Courage by some reviewers. Read Stephen Crane’s book instead, it’s a classic, and only costs $2.50 in mass market paperback.
Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this book thinking it to be about a horse and surprise, it’s about a boy’s quest during the Civil War. As a read it was okay but not marvelous.
Rating: 2 / 5
I had never read a novel by this author and came away disappointed. He seems to enjoy using arcane words (”cobby horse” for “stout horse” being a good example) that are not necessary to move the story along. I could understand this if it were in dialog, but the usage is typically not.
The writing struck me as emotionally flat, full of too hard to believe coincidences- finding his father on the Gettysburg battlefield (which is quite large), having two antagonists show up, separately no less, at his mothers wilderness farm- are three examples.
Finally, to be picky, he has a major plot flaw regarding the aftermath of the battle- as Robey arrived at Gettysburg after the battle he surely would have encountered the Confederate Army in full retreat on its way south to the Potomac River.
In summary, I felt I wasted my time reading this novel, and won’t embark on any more by Olmstead.
Rating: 1 / 5
The above quote tells quite a bit about Olmstead’s “Coal Black Horse.” It is garnish and flair, it is pretty words and gruesome descriptions of the horrors of war, but it is a story without a point, except to say that life is without value and, eventually, someone will end yours and it will all be over.
Olmstead borrows heavily from the styles of Howard Bahr and Stephen Crane to create this book. From The Red Badge of Courage he borrows the stylistic device of never quite letting the reader what battlefields or locations the book is set in – that is until he suddenly tells you that it’s in Gettysburg. How Robey avoids tens of thousands Confederate soldiers stacked up along the Potomac River (they massed there for days waiting for flood waters to go down) is a mystery to me. Why Olmstead decides to tell the reader the battlefield at that moment is a mystery as well.
From Bahr he borrows many of the same style of battlefield descriptions – the chaotic glimpses of a battle that remind me of quick movie cuts. The poetic descriptions of awful destruction, brutality and inhumanity are powerful, and reminescent of Bahr. But, Olmstead lacks Bahr’s ability to tell a story. “Coal Black Horse” plods along and eventually becomes a dark, depressing novel. It starts with death and ends with 2 murders and two attempted murders and no one seems to care about any of it. No love. No joy. Just dreary existence.
I must take issue with the canned editorial reviews posted by Amazon above, there is not a hint of redemption in the whole thing (not that there has to be, but it makes me doubt that the reviewers even read the books).
I note in the back cover that Olmstead received an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant to write this book. If this is what we are paying for with government-provided grants, than I suggest we stop. Certainly he can write this stuff on his own. Others write much better works and without government assistance.
I strongly suggest instead:
The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War
Rating: 2 / 5