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What is the nature of evil? What makes a person a monster? From NYT Bestselling author, West Point graduate and former Green Beret Bob Mayer comes a novel that raises those questions.
In 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman made Georgia howl. He burned a sixty-mile swath across the state to break the Confederacy's will and end the war. He believed destruction on a massive scale was mercy in disguise — that hard war saved more lives than it took. He was probably right. But being right didn't make it clean and history still argues it.
On the periphery of Sherman's March to the Sea, a pack of killers operates in his army's shadow. A former Andersonville prison guard and prisoners —Union men who had fed on their fellow prisoners — they rape, murder, and plunder across the Georgia countryside. Their leader is a one-eyed sniper known as Skull, a man the war didn't break. It freed him. He is what waited on the other side of civilization's leash. Sherman recruits three men: a black Union soldier, a frontiersman he knew from before the war, and an infantryman to track this pack down.
Sherman made Georgia howl to end a war. Skull made Georgia howl because the howling was all he knew.
Between them stands every question the Civil War raised about the nature of evil. What justifies terrible acts? Is the general who burns farms different from the predator who butchers its families?
Howl is a story about a hunt across a burning landscape. It is also a story about the spectrum of human darkness — from the cold calculus of a man who destroys for strategic purpose, to the dark evil of a man who reduces human beings to their material value, to the pure savagery of a man who kills because killing is what he is. And caught among them all, a boy who has witnessed the worst humanity can produce and held onto one small refusal that keeps him human.
The monsters are real. They always have been. The only question is whether anyone is willing to hunt them — and what it costs to come back from the dark.
By the author of the bestselling trilogy Duty,Honor, Country series, a NY Times bestselling author, a West Point graduate and former Infantryman and Green Beret.
Genre: Historical
In 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman made Georgia howl. He burned a sixty-mile swath across the state to break the Confederacy's will and end the war. He believed destruction on a massive scale was mercy in disguise — that hard war saved more lives than it took. He was probably right. But being right didn't make it clean and history still argues it.
On the periphery of Sherman's March to the Sea, a pack of killers operates in his army's shadow. A former Andersonville prison guard and prisoners —Union men who had fed on their fellow prisoners — they rape, murder, and plunder across the Georgia countryside. Their leader is a one-eyed sniper known as Skull, a man the war didn't break. It freed him. He is what waited on the other side of civilization's leash. Sherman recruits three men: a black Union soldier, a frontiersman he knew from before the war, and an infantryman to track this pack down.
Sherman made Georgia howl to end a war. Skull made Georgia howl because the howling was all he knew.
Between them stands every question the Civil War raised about the nature of evil. What justifies terrible acts? Is the general who burns farms different from the predator who butchers its families?
Howl is a story about a hunt across a burning landscape. It is also a story about the spectrum of human darkness — from the cold calculus of a man who destroys for strategic purpose, to the dark evil of a man who reduces human beings to their material value, to the pure savagery of a man who kills because killing is what he is. And caught among them all, a boy who has witnessed the worst humanity can produce and held onto one small refusal that keeps him human.
The monsters are real. They always have been. The only question is whether anyone is willing to hunt them — and what it costs to come back from the dark.
By the author of the bestselling trilogy Duty,Honor, Country series, a NY Times bestselling author, a West Point graduate and former Infantryman and Green Beret.
Genre: Historical