The villain in The Blood of Heaven is so carefully crafted that evil makes disturbing sense
Kent Wascom’s novel The Blood of Heaven opens with one-armed slave trader Angel Woolsack urinating on a New Orleans crowd; he’s celebrating Louisiana’s secession from the Union.
The sprawling narrative will take readers back several decades and across the gory, frantic American frontier (which, in those days, was well east of where we mentally place the Old West), but the slap-across-the-chops immediacy of Wascom’s opening image never relents. This ferocious, intoxicating book won the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, and the honor was well deserved.
The son of an itinerant fire-and-brimstone preacher, Angel Woolsack spends his teens traveling with his father around what will eventually be the Midwest. On paper, the years around 1800 are exciting, with Louisiana reverting from France to Spain before being sold to the United States to finance Napoleon’s wars; but the dirt farmers and measles-ravaged natives whom Woolsacks encounters don’t care which empire they technically inhabit. They need food and medicine, but try to make do with the Gospel.
On one mission stop, Angel is initiated into sex by a farmer’s daughter; when she falls pregnant, her mother drowns her. Guilt-ridden, and finding no sympathy from the townsfolk or his father, Angel abandons the ministry. Alternately preaching and scamming, he makes his way down the Mississippi River to West Florida, a colonial tidbit comprising today’s Florida parishes and the Mississippi and Alabama boot heels, ruled from Baton Rouge in the name of the King of Spain.
By now an honorary brother to a pair of preacher-rogues he met on his travels, Angel becomes embroiled in their scheme to overthrow Spanish rule and establish a republic in West Florida under Aaron Burr. Their subsequent struggles with authority in American Mississippi and Spanish Florida bloom into a cycle of violence, jeopardizing the lives of everyone in the disputed region and the fate of the proposed republic itself. Their bid eventually fails, although a short-lived Republic of West Florida with a capital at St. Francisville did exist for a few months in 1810 before being absorbed by the greedily expanding United States.
It sounds like a bad punchline, but The Blood of Heaven’s biggest weaknesses are the very beginning and the very end. After the arresting opening image, Wascom lets Angel deliver a manifesto about time, race, and fatherhood—and it doesn’t quite work. The reader doesn’t know Angel yet, so the speech has no context; and the bloody, flowery language that comes naturally to this ex-preacher requires acclimation. The end of the novel is marked by a dramatic, violent act that—without giving too much away—seems similarly unprovoked and startling; a novel so otherwise well crafted deserves a better payoff.
Wascom can write. The narrative voice of his protagonist thunders, remonstrates, and rejoices in the dramatic, absolutist terms of an old-fashioned preacher. Wascom occasionally overdoes it—it would suffice to occasionally “go to the door” instead of “traverse to the entrance, behind which was I knew not what”—but Wascom’s facility with and obvious joy in language more than make up for his excesses.
With impressive skill, he also sustains the reader’s interest in the fate of a protagonist who is, by any conventional measure, evil:
On the river, Angel runs a scam with free blacks in which he sells them into slavery, then helps them escape a few days later. They repeat this con until Angel tires of his accomplices, leaving them in bondage while he heads on down the river. He kills casually—shooting, stabbing, and riding down the ungodly and the inconvenient alike. The nicest thing to say about Angel is that he doesn’t rape anyone; yet Wascom’s villain, whose thoughts and actions are drafted with such care and intensity by the author, is no maniacal cartoon character. Instead, Angel personifies the potential for evil to have perfect, internal consistency.
I read the first half of this book quickly because I was so taken with it, then had to put it aside for other work. When I returned, it was hard to re-enter Angel’s world: the spell is so strong that, if broken, it’s hard to reassemble. Take the book on a long trip or a lazy vacation—a time when you can really settle in and live in this book for a while. It’s not a pretty world, but the colors are bright, the accents intriguing, and the danger all too near.
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