The Winter Family

February 23, 2015
Jackman’s novel is a blood-soaked historical western covering over three decades of mayhem, from the Civil War to 1900 Los Angeles. There are no good guys here, just killers, thieves, liars, crooks of every stripe, and piles of victims—killed in numerous ways. The Winter Family is a gang of vicious killers and renegade Union soldiers, formed in 1864, during the Union Army’s destructive march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Led by Augustus Winter, the most cold-blooded of all, the gang robs, rapes, and butchers everyone they meet—even the other Yankees are appalled at their brutality. Augustus eventually leads the marauders in postwar fights with carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux Klan, before being hired as political leg-breakers in Chicago during the corrupt and violent 1872 elections. Winter and his trigger-happy pals are too effective in fomenting election-day violence and have to flee Chicago, stopping just long enough to torture and murder their hapless benefactor. The gang spends the ensuing years raiding the west, from Canada to Arizona, though by 1891 a showdown in Oklahoma finds the law, and internal betrayal, whittling the gang’s numbers down considerably. The strength of the story is Jackman’s vivid portrayal of men who choose violence and lawlessness as their way of life, and the justifications they create to rationalize their immoral behavior. This is a chilling tale.

February 15, 2015
In Jackman's allegorical Western tale, Augustus Winter, with "the strength of will, the sense of purpose, radiating off him like heat," is cut from the same bloody cloth as Blood Meridian's mysterious nihilist, Judge Holden. From the opening page, a vortex of violence rages through the book, leading from Sherman's March to the Sea to Chicago, Arizona and Oklahoma. The men who will become the Winter Family are initially a group of "bummers," foragers scouting ahead of Sherman's army. They're first led by psychopathic Lt. Quentin Ross, who has a face "powerful but empty and alien," but it's Winter, with "a shuttered light of madness" in his eyes, who will soon seize control. His henchmen will be the brothers Empire, each "stupid and cruel," and other characters less diabolical, like Fred Johnson, a master-murdering slave, or immigrant Jan Muller, who even in Georgia believes he's "doing something very, very wrong in the service of some higher ideal that was slipping farther away all the time." The gang wreaks havoc across Georgia, next joins the rape of the Reconstruction South, and then hires on as mercenaries to keep Chicago government from being seized by Democrats. The Chicago settings are Sinclair Lewis' The Jungle writ large, from slaughterhouse to saloons to street fights. Genocide's next, with the marauders killing Native Americans in Oklahoma amid the land rush's "lawless and chaotic" aftermath. Add St. Augustine, Hobbes, scalp-hunting and, yes, waterboarding, and it's evident that the unrelenting violence is symbolic of Jackman's belief that "every society has at its core an animating myth, a guiding narrative, a shared lens through which to view the world"-and here, it's persuasion by Spencer rifle. Bloodletting as philosophical exercise, and not for the faint of heart.

February 15, 2015
The Winter family assembles almost randomly in 1864 Georgia, Union irregulars spinning off from Sherman's brutal march. It's the right environment for Augustus Winter, a primordial butcher who kills in the name of the Lord, and for his psychopathic commander, Quentin Ross, who has a philosophy of sorts about how there are laws to war that, once invoked, must be followed through to their ruinous, bloody end. As he tells it, he is but the instrument of those laws, though in reality he's a psychopath, leading psychopaths. After the war, the group transforms into a mercenary force that fights the Ku Klux Klan, among other rebels, and then works as enforcers for crooked Chicago politicians. Finally, after a varied career as paid thugs, and sometimes just as outlaws, they drift into Arizona and become bounty hunters. Jackman writes well, with great atmosphere, though the cruelty of his characters is so relentless and one-dimensional that it borders on banality, and maybe that's the point. The hard realism and violence, combined with the evocative prose, will intrigue readers of Cormac McCarthy and James Lee Burke.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2015

The son of a hard and violent preacher, Augustus Winter is a remorseless, scripture-quoting gun-for-hire. During the Civil War, a group of like-minded men coalesce around his oddly charismatic presence. Working at the outskirts of civil society, the Winter Family, as the gang is known, perpetrate violence for the highest bidder. Dark and unsentimental, the story moves quickly from the gang's inception to a betrayal by one of their own and the bloody retribution that follows. VERDICT Told in sections from Georgia in 1864, through Chicago, Phoenix, Oklahoma, and finally to California in 1900, this noir Western is a violent rampage through the American West. Canadian author Jackman (Oklahoma 1891) is a deft hand when describing the world, both physical and social, that the gang moves through, although the dialog can be oddly stilted. Sympathetic characters come and go, but the focus is on Augustus as he moves through the shifting frontier landscape, shedding companions as he goes, adapting for survival with surprising ease. While it doesn't break new ground, fans of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and James Carlos Blake's In the Rogue Blood will appreciate this latest entry in the gritty Western genre. [Prepub Alert, 10/27/14.]--Sarah Cohn, Manhattan Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2014

This bleak and edgy new take on the Western traces the ascent of a group of particularly nasty outlaws from Civil War times to the chaos of the Oklahoma territories. The "family" is led by Augustus Winter, who has a taste for blood and a distaste for society's rules, and includes crazed killer Quentin Ross; the Empire brothers, vicious dullards both; former slave Fred Johnson; and scary child prodigy Lukas Shakespeare.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.