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The horror story has been rolling along quickly. Not having to fact-check historical detail really frees up the imagination.

I recently finished reading Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead. I had a workshop with him eleven years ago at the now-defunct Rappahannock Fiction Writers Workshop. It was my first writing workshop and he had a ton of advice, some of it very hands-on and some a little more abstract. I soaked up as much as I could, but I suspect he was a little disappointed in us because by the third day he was, in effect, lecturing us that he was trying to help us. Coal Black Horse is set primarily in Gettysburg, and it's vintage Olmstead in that it has a very moral tone and minimal dialogue. It may be classified as 'guy lit' as one reviewer compares it to Cormac MacCarthy. Having read some of MacCarthy's work, Olmstead does write in the same vein - horses, arduous travel, dangerous adventures.

In contrast, just before Coal Black Horse I read Clint McOwn's War Memorials. Clint currently teaches at the Vermont PostGraduate Writing Conference, which I've attended three times. I bought his book after hearing him read one evening, in part because his work sounded funny. What I very much liked about War Memorials is that it's a novel composed of short stories, and most of the chapters could stand on their own as short stories. That's how I believe most novels should be ideally structured. My own don't work that way, which explains my admiration for his technical skill.

What disappointed me in WM was a climactic scene between the main character and the bad guy who has been sleeping with his wife and has probably impregnated her. Now, the POV is first person through the main character and he considers himself a loser and non-violent. The scene where these two guys should be having it out, the villain reveals he's dying from an aggressive cancer, and a minute later blows himself up, making any thrashing superfluous. I expected something a little less gimmicky, less deus ex machina. I did enjoy reading the book, and most of the characters were quaint Southern stereotypes, and the book was a gentle, nonviolent tale, so too much violence would have given the story a darker end than the writing justified... but it was a let-down.