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Title: The Silent

Author: Jack Dann

Narrator: Christopher Kipiniak

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-21-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

From the critically acclaimed author of The Memory Cathedral comes perhaps the most powerful, haunting, and unforgettable novel of the Civil War - or any war - ever written. Provocative, poetic, and disturbing, it introduces us to a young narrator, Mundy McDowell, whose voice rivals any in literature, bringing poignantly to life the surreal horrors of battle and its spiritual cost to human survival.I was scarce twelve the day the damn Yankees invaded the valley. I seen a lot that day I ain't never gonna forget.

Men blown apart, screamin' and dyin' all around me. I was wandering in the woods like I wasn't supposed to and wound up right in the middle of the battle. And that's what I suppose saved me.When I got back home the main house was burning to the ground. I saw two men wearin' bits and pieces of 'Federate and Yank uniforms. They killed Poppa right off, and Mother they dragged into the front yard before they killed her too. I reckon that was the day I first got the knack of being invisible.

The spirit dog seen me right off, though. He was big and black and smelled like burning. His eyes were like red coals and everywhere he went, it seemed death followed. Him and me, we mostly traveled together after that.

I passed through midnight fields of dead and dying soldiers, reeking makeshift field hospitals worse than hell itself; climbed into the mountains where the runaway slaves hid; and walked through towns shattered by the passage of the war.

I met a lot of people, some of them living and some of them just memories. There was Jimmadasin, the slave who died on my account, and Mammy Jack, who taught me to see visions; the gallant Colonel Ashby, who let me ride by his side, and, of course, the mulatto whore Lucy, who saved my life twice.

Last but not least, there was mad but brilliant General Jackson, who was probably responsible for putting more men in their graves than any other during the Shenandoah campaign. Whether he was a hero or a demon I never did determine, but I wish I had never met him at all.

And through it all I remained silent. The power of speech left me the day my parents were killed and I first saw the spirit dog. You see, the whole time I was wandering through that valley of death I was deciding on whether to go back to being human or to become a spirit myself, and that's what this book is all about.

Members Reviews:

"Most emphatically recommended." --Library Journal

"It was around the time I saw the spirit dog and became invisible that I forgot how to talk. Getting to be a spirit meant you had to lose things." This fine novel tells the horrific tale of a boy unable to escape from a hell he didn't make and can't begin to understand. Mundy McDowell, not even 13 yet, watches in silence as Yankee deserters kill his father, rape and murder his mother, and set fire to their home. He is struck dumb, his thoughts filled with recurrent `visions' of sex, death, and mutilation. The line between reality and fantasy is tenuous in his mind, all the more so because of constant hunger and illness. Mundy traverses a nightmare landscape, engaged on a demon quest, seeking an inner peace that no longer can be found. From the author of The Memory Cathedral, this is narrative storytelling at its best-so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended.