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Title: Darker Angels

Author: S. P. Somtow

Narrator: Judith West

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-25-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 5 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Based on an acclaimed short story that was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, "Darker Angels" takes the reader from the bloodstained battlefields of Virginia to the slave auctions of Haiti. Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, and Marie Leveau, the legendary voodoo queen of New Orleans, all have a part to play in the epic tale of a mysterious, one-eyed shaman who dares to raise the dead from the battlefields of the Civil War.

Members Reviews:

Daker Angels Shines Through!

I've read MOONDANCE some years ago and was totally capitivated by the story. Now several years later, I come across Darker Angels (though out of print, I got from the used section at Amazon and the service was EXCELLENT!). Here, Somtow weaves another fabulous tapestry of horror, fantasy and history all in one! (Just reading the other better reviews is proof positive.) We even get to see the origin of the most foul Cordwainer Claggett [sic] a villain we met in MOONDANCE. In Darker Angels, the multi-level narration by the different players is fantastic (though at times tricky but works out well in the end). Just a word of warning, this book is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. I look forward to more from this author. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

Complex Civil War Alternate History Rewarding When Savored

What a rich and diverse tapestry is S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, a dark novel of the Civil War that's told as a phantasmagorical series of stories within stories like concentric rings. There's really no way to do justice to its structure in this brief description, but it must be said that such a potentially intrusive device here causes no confusion and indeed takes nothing away from the desperately grim beauty of the words that make up each and every narration.

From the strange beginning, in which the recently widowed Mrs. Paula Grainger meets Walt Whitman while clandestinely visiting the body of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, to the whirling, wild, wonderful stories of the war later told by Whitman and his young friend, Zachary Brown, and then the stories told by those within the stories ... about the elderly voodoo prince, Old Joseph, who as a free slave raises black Union soldiers from the dead for one last skirmish, and the boy preacher who may have killed his own father, Jimmie Lee Cox, and Tyler Tyler, the young soldier with no arms, and bewitching Phoebe, the voodoo priestess who holds the power to transform herself into a black panther, and finally re(folding) back onto the Reverend Grainger--whose correspondents include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and the President himself, and who is not at all quite the way his wife thinks him to be.

This is a novel of transformation, of being, of death, and of living the true life that only the grimness of death can bring. It's a novel less about the Civil War than about all wars, but it is quite specifically a Civil War novel, in which the richness of the themes runs like blood spilled between brothers and comrades, masters and slaves. This novel is grotesque, yet it makes such wise statements about the grotesqueness of war and slavery and religion that its own gruesomeness seems not only natural but necessary. Composer and film-maker S. P. Somtow weaves together so many disparate narrative voices yet produces a single cloth of intense beauty and rage, in which inhumanity vies with love as the fiercest of emotions.