Skip Horack. (2010). The Eden Hunter: A Novel. Catapult.

Skip Horack. 2010. The Eden Hunter: A Novel. Catapult.

Skip Horack, The Eden Hunter: A Novel. Catapult, 2010.

Skip Horack. The Eden Hunter: A Novel. Catapult, 2010.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Horack, Skip
   • bioText: Skip Horack is the author of the story collection The Southern Cross. He is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. A native of Louisiana, and a graduate of Florida State University, he now lives in San Francisco.
   • name: Skip Horack

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title

The Eden Hunter

fullDescription

In 1816, five years after being captured and sold into slavery, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, flees south into the Spanish Florida wilderness, determined to find a place where he can once again live in harmony with nature. Both haunted and driven by his memories of Africa, he embarks on an epic quest through the treacherous pinewoods, swamps, and river bottoms of the Southern frontier. He encounters renegades and thieves, traitors and mercenaries, and the dark prophetic magic of the forest before he finally finds himself within the walls of a remote fort on the Apalachicola River. There, he becomes the reluctant companion of several hundred runaway slaves once recruited by the British to fight in the War of 1812, then abandoned to fend for themselves against the American forces intent on destroying their remarkable stronghold.
Inspired by actual events, and at times both violent and beautiful, The Eden Hunter provides a fascinating glimpse at a forgotten, bloody chapter in our nation's history through the eyes of one truly remarkable hero.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Jill McCorkle
   • content: "Horack, the author of a well–received story collection, The Southern Cross, writes luminous, clean prose, holding the fantastically beautiful wilderness steadily in front of us, but also describing a scalping or evisceration with a matter–of–fact directness that reminds us how the terms of that world were negotiated and understood. He has a poet's tuned attentiveness, but never uses his sentences to preen. Reading his novel, I thought more than once of Cormac McCarthy--not just of the calmly depicted frontier slaughter of Blood Meridian, but also of the scoured post–apocalyptic vision of The Road. What a pair of American bookends The Road and The Eden Hunter would make--one traversing the ruins of a world that has spent its promise, the other bringing us in just as the whole bitter and doomed business is getting started."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Tom Franklin
   • content: "Kau is a pygmy tribesman forced into slavery from his African home at the turn of the 19th century. After five years, he escapes into the Florida wilds, leaving his mentor and fellow slave, Samuel, and his slave master's son, Benjamin, with whom he has developed a kinship. Kau intends to live in nature, as he did as a member of the Ota tribe in Africa. Eventually, after numerous encounters along the way, Kau comes across a British fort on the Apalachicola River given to former slaves who were fighting along with the British during the War of 1812. Garçon, who has declared himself the general, takes Kau into their encampment. They intend to hold off the Americans who eventually attack the fort while Kau attempts to leave with others before imminent peril. VERDICT Horack follows up The Southern Cross, a collection of short stories, with a visceral and authentic account of a distinctive character and his quest for freedom. For some readers, this work may bring to...
3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 19, 2010
     Louisiana-born Horack's novel (after The Southern Cross collection) offers a stylish, fast-paced, historical narrative based on an 1816 slave insurrection. Spanish slave traders enter the Congo and purchase a captured Pygmy named Kau, transporting him to Pensacola, Fla., where he's sold to an innkeeper. Five years later, Kau kills the innkeeper's son and flees into the wilds of southern Florida. Along his wilderness trek, Kau regrets the murder, yearns for his family in Africa, and encounters a "Negro fort" on the Apalachicola River built by General Garçon. The remote fort's ostentatious "genius" commander befriends the diminutive Kau, who is allowed to take an escaped slave as his mate. The American victory in the War of 1812 makes Garçon, an ally of the British, a target of the imminent American invasion. While sympathetic to the slaves' desire to be free, Kau realizes the slim chance for success against the Americans; he's more inclined to follow his heart and "live quietly" in Florida than stand with Garçon. This diminutive man serves as a watchful protagonist in Horack's crisp, vivid tale.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 15, 2010
     

     After his story collection The Southern Cross (2009), Horack's first novel tracks the adventures of a pygmy (and runaway slave) in early-19th-century Florida. 

     Kau is a pygmy from central Africa. A tribal dispute leaves his family dead. Sold into slavery, he works for five years for a foul-tempered innkeeper in Georgia. By 1815, he's had enough. The 29-year-old African enlists the help of Benjamin, the innkeeper's son, in his escape, but when he refuses to allow Benjamin to accompany him, things go horribly wrong. He kills Benjamin, not intentionally, but murder is murder, and Kau will see himself as "a tiny cursed child-killer." He makes his way to Florida. Not yet a U.S. territory, it's a no-man's-land, a patchwork occupied by the British, Spanish and Americans, as well as Indian tribes and runaway slaves. For Kau, violence proves inescapable. Before leaving Georgia, he was forced to kill a sentinel and a slavecatcher. He falls in with some redsticks (Creek Indians) who pressgang him into an attack on some white highwaymen. The redsticks die; Kau lives. His journey continues in its loose-jointed, anecdotal way until he crosses the path of the so-called General Garçon. The General is a highly educated runaway who has inherited a fort from the departing British. A charismatic leader, he has forged an alliance of English and Spanish-speaking blacks and Choctaws. His mission, to repel the advancing Americans, is doomed but galvanizing, more so than Kau's quest for a sanctuary. It is significant that Kau's finest hour comes as a dancing decoy who lures some American sailors to their death. Twice Kau attempts to leave the fort, and twice he returns, a yo-yo answering the General's magnetic pull. So the novel is thrown out of whack, and the destination and salvation of the little fellow with the filed teeth ceases to matter that much. 

     Structurally flawed, but remarkably evocative—Horack's Florida is as real as your own backyard. 

     (COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 1, 2010
     

     Kau is a pygmy tribesman forced into slavery from his African home at the turn of the 19th century. After five years, he escapes into the Florida wilds, leaving his mentor and fellow slave, Samuel, and his slave master's son, Benjamin, with whom he has developed a kinship. Kau intends to live in nature, as he did as a member of the Ota tribe in Africa. Eventually, after numerous encounters along the way, Kau comes across a British fort on the Apalachicola River given to former slaves who were fighting along with the British during the War of 1812. Garcon, who has declared himself the general, takes Kau into their encampment. They intend to hold off the Americans who eventually attack the fort while Kau attempts to leave with others before imminent peril. VERDICT Horack follows up The Southern Cross, a collection of short stories, with a visceral and authentic account of a distinctive character and his quest for freedom. For some readers, this work may bring to mind Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain or Toni Morrison's Beloved.--Cristella Bond, Anderson P.L., IN

     Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 15, 2010
     Five years after capture and enslavement in the American South, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, manages to escape. He flees into the wilder territories of unsettled Florida, an area still very much in dispute between Native Americans and white Americans, between runaway slaves and slave catchers, between black recruits to the British army to fight the War of 1812 and the white American military. Kau finds himself caught between cultures and clashes on an odyssey through the Florida swamplands, haunted by memories of his own tribe and family, struggling to reconcile the alliances and animosities among the warring black, red, and white tribes he encounters. He meets Native Americans fighting with and against encroaching white men, a family of freed blacks eking a life for themselves, and a mesmerizing former slave who commands a fort while leading a doomed mission. What Kau wants is to find a space in the wilderness that will return him to himself. Horack is masterful in rendering a story of a man whose singularity offers fresh perspective on a turbulent period in American history in an exceptionally evocative novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 15, 2010
     

     After his story collection The Southern Cross (2009), Horack's first novel tracks the adventures of a pygmy (and runaway slave) in early-19th-century Florida.

     Kau is a pygmy from central Africa. A tribal dispute leaves his family dead. Sold into slavery, he works for five years for a foul-tempered innkeeper in Georgia. By 1815, he's had enough. The 29-year-old African enlists the help of Benjamin, the innkeeper's son, in his escape, but when he refuses to allow Benjamin to accompany him, things go horribly wrong. He kills Benjamin, not intentionally, but murder is murder, and Kau will see himself as "a tiny cursed child-killer." He makes his way to Florida. Not yet a U.S. territory, it's a no-man's-land, a patchwork occupied by the British, Spanish and Americans, as well as Indian tribes and runaway slaves. For Kau, violence proves inescapable. Before leaving Georgia, he was forced to kill a sentinel and a slavecatcher. He falls in with some redsticks (Creek Indians) who pressgang him into an attack on some white highwaymen. The redsticks die; Kau lives. His journey continues in its loose-jointed, anecdotal way until he crosses the path of the so-called General Gar�on. The General is a highly educated runaway who has inherited a fort from the departing British. A charismatic leader, he has forged an alliance of English and Spanish-speaking blacks and Choctaws. His mission, to repel the advancing Americans, is doomed but galvanizing, more so than Kau's quest for a sanctuary. It is significant that Kau's finest hour comes as a dancing decoy who lures some American sailors to their death. Twice Kau attempts to leave the fort, and twice he returns, a yo-yo answering the General's magnetic pull. So the novel is thrown out of whack, and the destination and salvation of the little fellow with the filed teeth ceases to matter that much.

     Structurally flawed, but remarkably evocative--Horack's Florida is as real as your own backyard.

     (COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

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In 1816, five years after being captured and sold into slavery, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, flees south into the Spanish Florida wilderness, determined to find a place where he can once again live in harmony with nature. Both haunted and driven by his memories of Africa, he embarks on an epic quest through the treacherous pinewoods, swamps, and river bottoms of the Southern frontier. He encounters renegades and thieves, traitors and mercenaries, and the dark prophetic magic of the forest before he finally finds himself within the walls of a remote fort on the Apalachicola River. There, he becomes the reluctant companion of several hundred runaway slaves once recruited by the British to fight in the War of 1812, then abandoned to fend for themselves against the American forces intent on destroying their remarkable stronghold.
Inspired by actual events, and at times both violent and beautiful, The Eden Hunter provides a fascinating glimpse at a forgotten, bloody chapter in our...

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