The Judas Field (ePub)

Howard Bahr is the author of four novels: The Black Flower (1997), The Year of Jubilo (2000), The Judas Field (2006), and Pelican Road (2008). A native of Meridian, Mississippi, he served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War and worked for several years as a railroad yard clerk and brakeman. From 1982 to 1993, Bahr was curator of Rowan Oak, the William Faulkner homestead and museum in Oxford, Mississippi. His last post was as writer-in-residence at Belhaven University.

“The book’s pace and detail are wrenching, and it is starkly devoid of romanticism. . . . The stories of ordinary men make for the novel’s most provocative and deeply true sections. . . . The soldiers who survive the war are never done with it. This condition is not presented as the romantic clinging to a lost cause that has impeded honest assessment of those Americans who fought and lost a war, but as a complex meditation on existence. . . . Bahr’s accomplishment is magnificent.” —The Washington Post Book World
 
“Bahr knows how to turn a phrase and tug on the emotions, visceral feelings that we try to keep buried. His descriptions of the carnage of battlefields, of what bullets and bayonets can do to human flesh, will chill you to the bone. . . . His is a rare talent.” —The Denver Post
 
“Absorbing . . . This is a mature work of fiction by a gifted writer—affectingly eloquent and fearless of complexity and ambiguity.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“By tying together elements from [The Black Flower and The Year of Jubilo] in The Judas Field, Bahr creates what has become a moving, elegiac trilogy on the meaning of war that goes beyond victory or defeat.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A brooding meditation on loss, memory and the enduring emotional wreckage of combat . . . Bahr is capable of casting a lyrical spell even when describing almost unbearable horror.” —TheBaltimore Sun
 
“Bahr is at his poetic best here, every word chosen and placed precisely and beautifully. The Judas Field presents us with a heartbreakingly realistic picture of the madness born of violence and war, and the redemption to be found when the past is finally put to rest.” —BookPage
 
“In his third Civil War novel . . .