This is the story of Angel Woolsack, who came to an isolated and poverty-stricken community in 1776. He's alone with his father, his mother having died, and his father is a fire and brimstone preacher who disciplines his son by making him swallow live coals. Things only become more bleak and bloody from there, as Angel runs away from home, forming a partnership with two brothers, and taking their name as his own as they seek first to survive, through preaching and robbery, then to create a new country, called West Florida, with the help, they hope, of the American leader, Aaron Burr.

Kent Wascom has created a violent world, where the only way to survive is to embrace cruelty and to strike without mercy. This isn't a comfortable story with a happy ending, but it is riveting and blood-soaked, if that's what you're in the mood for. ( )

Very good writing but a very slow pace. Good for a patient reader. ( )

Blogged at River City Reading:
Kent Wascom's debut novel traces the life of Angel Woolsack, who leaves his preacher father and the plains of Missouri to create a new life with his adopted brother, Samuel Kemper, in the early 1800's. The pair navigates their way through the South, loosening their morals and discovering breaking points on their journey toward settlement in West Florida. Through love, death, murder and marriage, Angel and his companions map out the harsh history behind the creation of the United States.

Early in The Blood of Heaven, many of the characters' actions are dictated by a desire to spread or purify their religion, freeing them of guilt regardless of their immorality. Yet, as readers watch Angel's choices lead him further from his starting point, he finds he must warp his justifications in order to deal with the crimes he has committed. This becomes one of the novel's overarching themes, one that can easily be seen paralleled in today's society some 200 years later.

"...if a man can't blaspheme when he is on the raw edge of revelation, then when? If you can hear the thunder of the holy heartbeat, where the conscience rests that burns holes in the sky and calls up pits of spiders to swallow the weak, do what comes natural and your actions will be smiled upon."

Though the last of the novel's four books lacks the pace of the rest, Wascom delivers an incredibly powerful debut. At just 26 years-old, he writes with the voice of a master, creating effortless phrases that read like they took lifetimes to compose. Those stunning sentences combined with bold violence, well researched history and questionable morality make The Blood of Heaven worthy of all its praise. ( )

This book just was not for me. The story took forever to go anywhere and the fact that the book was written in the language of the early 1800's did not help me get into the story, also there is not a single character who I cared about. ( )

Blood of Heaven, by Kent Wascom, is an exceptionally powerful, violent, and disturbing historical novel about a little-known chapter in America’s early frontier history: the failed Kemper Brother’s Rebellion against the Spanish in West Florida in 1804. It also covers the brothers’ subsequent involvement in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, a treasonous attempt to create an independent country in Louisiana and Mexico.

The novel opens in 1861 when Mississippi became the second state to seceded from the Union. A 75-year-old man is looking over his balcony at crowds celebrating in the streets. He’s disgusted, angry, defeated, and overwhelmed by memories about his youth and his participation in the early political history of this region…and so the first person narrative begins. The old man becomes a boy of thirteen and the time falls back to 1799. The place is the tall grass prairie, a desolate wilderness of wretched pioneers living in holes dug out of the ground, far beyond the edge of civilization.

Told from the heart, revealing fascinating and complex psychological detail, the novel focuses on the inner life of its fictional main character, Angel Woolsack. He is portrayed as a fearless, self-assured, and morally disoriented man brought up to believe that whatever he does, he is acting as a direct instrument of God. Angel was raised by his father, an abusive, mentally unstable, and dangerous hellfire-and-brimstone evangelist. Together, they’ve been traveling the isolated frontier spreading the Gospel of Truth. The father is a religious fanatic who easily twists religion into an evil tool. As his disciple, Angel learns the skill of mesmerizing a crowd with the Word of Truth. He’s a naturally charismatic leader and preacher. But from his father, he also inherits a distorted sense of morality.

Circumstances unfold that force Angel to flee his father and the frontier community in which they are living. He escapes with another young man, Samuel Kemper, the son of a rival traveling evangelist. The two become brothers at heart and eke out an existence in a lawless frontier. Eventually, they meet up with Samuel’s older brother, Reuben, in the New Orleans area. After a rowdy “baptism of brotherhood” ceremony, Angel becomes an “adopted” Kemper brother and starts using the family last name.

At this point, the novel abruptly morphs from pure fiction into well researched, conscientious, and carefully imagined historical fiction. The novel begins telling the story of the Kemper Brothers and their 1804 Rebellion. The author artfully eliminates the third Kemper brother, Nathan, and substitutes his fictional character Angel. It is a brilliant plot structure; the author has managed to place his psychologically damaged, complex and compelling fictional character at the very heart of an authentic slice of early American history. The lion’s share of the rest of the major secondary characters and their actions represent real historical figures and facts.

The novel is masterfully rendered in stunning, gorgeous, muscular prose; it frequently left me breathless. I often stopped to reread passages for better understanding or simply to re-experience the sheer beauty of the words. But I have to add that these words were not easy to read. In order to achieve a high degree of period authenticity, the author chose to create a unique style of narrative that is full of linguistic anachronisms. The text appears to be an artful mix of Eighteenth Century evangelical writing and modern Southern prose and slang. It needs to be read carefully to absorb the meaning, but it sounds delightfully authentic. It made me feel like I’d been propelled backwards in time. To read this novel is to experience what it must have been like to live around New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Natchez during those lawless and culturally significant times when America was coming of age and realizing its manifest destiny.

This novel is filled with a lot of lawless and morally impoverished characters that easily commit violence on each other. Slave trading and abuse figure prominently in the text and the N-word is used perhaps a thousand times. The book is often disturbing and punishing to read. But there is also a magnificent richness to the cultural details imagined by the author. In his skillful hands, the period and the people become real. That is the gift of this novel. It is a realistic portrait of the pioneer spirit and the unruly frontier of a small corner of a young America. It is also a complex psychological study of a flawed man at the center of an important chapter in the history of our country.

I recommend it highly. It is certainly one of the most important books I have read in a long time. ( )