Kingdom Books Review

Mystical Revelations: Walking to Gatlinburg, Howard Frank Mosher's Civil War Novel

Mosher's direction in this book follows from the eerie double lives of his earlier work, especially in Disappearances. But it's clear that his years of traveling the country mostly alone in a rattling aging car, to promote his novels in one small town or crowded city after another, have pressed a deeper and more intense kind of haunting into him, and in this book, it spills out. This is no peaceful journey to "look for America" on a long-distance bus with a pocket full of guitar picks; it is instead a course through the gates of Hell, and across the River Styx, to where demons roam at will and goodness is frail, pale in the darkness.

If something buried within you rang in recognition as you read the mystical works of hermits and martyrs, or the fierce novels of Dan Brown or the sly wickedness of William Faulkner, then Walking to Gatlinburg will make you leap up in recognition, and in hope. I can't count the number of times I stopped during reading the book to say to my husband, "This is really strange. This is so strange. I know what this is doing and -- it's surpassingly strange."

Strange and good. In the sense that each of us is standing on the shoulders of giants, Mosher here stands on the work he himself has done before, and reaches a new country of possibility. What a read! - Kingdom Books