A Conversation with Howard Frank Mosher

Q: Walking to Gatlinburg has been described as a “Civil War thriller.” This is your tenth novel. Is it your first thriller?

A: Yes. My 1989 novel A Stranger in the Kingdom has some of the elements of a mystery, but Walking to Gatlinburg is the story of a young man whose life is in constant danger from the moment he decides to track down his older brother, who has gone missing in the Civil War. Morgan Kinneson, just 17 years old, walks from northern Vermont to the Great Smokies in search of his brother Pilgrim. At the same time, he is being pursued by a gang of psychopathic terrorists. To find Pilgrim, he has to eliminate them, one by one, while solving the mystery of a secret, runic stone in his possession. Most of my earlier books are high-action novels, but Walking to Gatlinburg is my first “non-stop thriller.” It was a great deal of fun to write.

Q: Is Morgan’s trek south to find his brother based on a true event?

A: It is, but ideas for novels come from strange and mysterious places, often deep in the writer’s imagination. Several years ago, a bookseller friend told me the story of her Confederate ancestor, a young soldier from North Carolina with the wonderful name of Jasper Memory. Jasper was captured and sent to the infamous Union prison at Elmira, N. Y. – known as the “Andersonville of the North.” While he was there, a fellow prisoner, a dentist in civilian life, made him, from a gold uniform button, a wedding ring for his fiancé. At the end of the war, Jasper walked home, all the way from Elmira to the mountains of North Carolina, to present the ring to his beloved. I couldn’t stop thinking about his journey. Eventually, in the very mysterious way that ideas for my novels have always come to me, I asked myself the “what if” question. What if, instead of a Confederate soldier returning home to get married, my guy walking south was a young Yankee looking for his missing brother? There was the inspiration for Walking to Gatlinburg.

Q: How long did it take to write Walking to Gatlinburg?

A: About seven years. The book went through dozens of drafts. One early incarnation was over 1,000 pages long. All I can say is that writing a novel takes as long as it takes.

Q: Did you do a lot of research?

A: Yes, but as with my Lewis and Clark novel, The True Account – in which, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a single true word – I wrote two or three complete, rough drafts of Walking to Gatlinburg first, before I did a great deal of research. That way I was able to fit the research into the story rather than tailoring the story and characters to fit historical fact. First and foremost, I’m a novelist, not a historian. The title of the slide show I’m doing for my book events for Walking to Gatlinburg is “Transforming History into Fiction: the Story of a Born Liar.”

That said, I spent many months retracing Morgan’s route south from northern Vermont to Gatlinburg, TN, and the Great Smokies. That, too, was a lot of fun. At the Gettysburg battlefield, I rescued a snapping turtle from the middle of the road leading From the “Slaughter Pen” to Little Round Top. That gave me an idea for the “talking land tortoise” scene in the novel. At Elmira, where more than 2,900 Confederate prisoners died of disease, malnutrition, and infection, I came across the wonderful and inspiring story of John Jones. A former runaway slave, Jones was the sexton of the local Baptist church, who respectfully buried all 2,900 deceased prisoners and returned their effects to their families. John Jones was an American hero. He was the inspiration for Jesse Moses, the runaway slave with the secret rune stone in Walking to Gatlinburg.

Q: You’ve been quoted as saying that the five escaped convicts pursuing Morgan in Walking to Gatlinburg make Dr. Hannibal Lector look like a Sunday school superintendent. Their evilness is nearly Elizabethan – like Iago’s or Richard III’s. How did you ever come up with them?

A: Eons ago, I wrote a master’s degree thesis on Shakespeare’s villains. But to cite a few specific examples from Walking to Gatlinburg, the evil vivisectionist, Doctor Surgeon, is based on an actual Union surgeon at the Elmira prison, who boasted that he had deliberately killed more Confederate soldiers than any northern cannon. Prophet Floyd, the mad preacher, and Steptoe, the necrophiliac actor, are mainly made up. But Morgan’s chief antagonist, the villainous minstrel Ludi Too, was inspired – I’m sorry to say – by my great, great grandfather, who attempted to murder his own family by dynamiting their home while they slept. Fortunately, great, great grandpa was the only casualty, though the ancestral home looked like a runaway locomotive smacked right through the middle of it. Most “thrillers” have a somewhat larger-than-life villain – Dr. Lector, Preacher in my all-time favorite thriller, Night of the Hunter. Walking to Gatlinburg has half a dozen villains, with the worst of the lot, Ludi Too, right out of the Mosher family annals.

Q: Most of your previous books have been set in the place you call “Kingdom County,” in the northern mountains of Vermont. In addition to its thriller elements, is Walking to Gatlinburg, much of which takes place in the South, a radical departure from your usual setting?

A: Not really. Most of Walking to Gatlinburg takes place in the wilderness of the Blue Ridge, Cumberland, and Great Smokies, which are all part of the same Appalachian chain as Vermont’s Green Mountains. What’s more, Morgan Kinneson, with his stubborn independent-mindedness, takes “Kingdom County” with him wherever he goes.

Q: You’ve written about the Kinneson family in many of your books, including A Stranger in the Kingdom and your 2007 novel On Kingdom Mountain, which is the story of Morgan’s daughter, Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. Were the Kinnesons inspired by a real family?

A: Yes, mine. The editor in A Stranger in the Kingdom is a lot like my father. Miss Jane in On Kingdom Mountain was inspired by my own great aunt Jane. Morgan Kinneson in Walking to Gatlinburg, in his love of the wilderness and his independence, reminds me of my son Jake. In a very real sense, all my novels are about my family.

Q: How about Slidell, the beautiful runaway slave girl in Walking to Gatlinburg?

A: In her kindness, wild sense of humor, and courage, Slidell is very much like my former high school classmate, now my wife of the past 46 years, Phillis Mosher. Phillis has inspired half a dozen characters in my fiction, from Athena Allen in A Stranger in the Kingdom to Slidell.

Q: There are two love stories woven through Walking to Gatlinburg. Without giving away too much, is it fair to say that both of them partake of the dark tone of the novel?

A: Yes. The Civil War was the darkest time of our history. It cast a long shadow over the lives of everyone it touched.

Q: Is Walking to Gatlinburg an anti-war novel?

A: Yes, but more than that, it’s an anti-violence novel. After the raid on Harpers Ferry, and perhaps even much earlier, after the Missouri Compromise, the war itself was probably almost inevitable. The brutal insane violence around its edges – Quantrill’s murderous raiders, preying Yankee “bummers” and Confederate “patrollers” and “Home Guard” – weren’t so very different from the very worst terrorists of our own era. Morgan’s greatest challenge may well be moving beyond a life of violence after he deals with the convicts pursuing him in Walking to Gatlinburg.