The Eden Hunter

July 19, 2010
Louisiana-born Horack's novel (after The Southern Cross collection) offers a stylish, fast-paced, historical narrative based on an 1816 slave insurrection. Spanish slave traders enter the Congo and purchase a captured Pygmy named Kau, transporting him to Pensacola, Fla., where he's sold to an innkeeper. Five years later, Kau kills the innkeeper's son and flees into the wilds of southern Florida. Along his wilderness trek, Kau regrets the murder, yearns for his family in Africa, and encounters a "Negro fort" on the Apalachicola River built by General Garçon. The remote fort's ostentatious "genius" commander befriends the diminutive Kau, who is allowed to take an escaped slave as his mate. The American victory in the War of 1812 makes Garçon, an ally of the British, a target of the imminent American invasion. While sympathetic to the slaves' desire to be free, Kau realizes the slim chance for success against the Americans; he's more inclined to follow his heart and "live quietly" in Florida than stand with Garçon. This diminutive man serves as a watchful protagonist in Horack's crisp, vivid tale.

July 15, 2010

After his story collection The Southern Cross (2009), Horack's first novel tracks the adventures of a pygmy (and runaway slave) in early-19th-century Florida. 

Kau is a pygmy from central Africa. A tribal dispute leaves his family dead. Sold into slavery, he works for five years for a foul-tempered innkeeper in Georgia. By 1815, he's had enough. The 29-year-old African enlists the help of Benjamin, the innkeeper's son, in his escape, but when he refuses to allow Benjamin to accompany him, things go horribly wrong. He kills Benjamin, not intentionally, but murder is murder, and Kau will see himself as "a tiny cursed child-killer." He makes his way to Florida. Not yet a U.S. territory, it's a no-man's-land, a patchwork occupied by the British, Spanish and Americans, as well as Indian tribes and runaway slaves. For Kau, violence proves inescapable. Before leaving Georgia, he was forced to kill a sentinel and a slavecatcher. He falls in with some redsticks (Creek Indians) who pressgang him into an attack on some white highwaymen. The redsticks die; Kau lives. His journey continues in its loose-jointed, anecdotal way until he crosses the path of the so-called General Garçon. The General is a highly educated runaway who has inherited a fort from the departing British. A charismatic leader, he has forged an alliance of English and Spanish-speaking blacks and Choctaws. His mission, to repel the advancing Americans, is doomed but galvanizing, more so than Kau's quest for a sanctuary. It is significant that Kau's finest hour comes as a dancing decoy who lures some American sailors to their death. Twice Kau attempts to leave the fort, and twice he returns, a yo-yo answering the General's magnetic pull. So the novel is thrown out of whack, and the destination and salvation of the little fellow with the filed teeth ceases to matter that much. 

Structurally flawed, but remarkably evocative—Horack's Florida is as real as your own backyard. 

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2010

Kau is a pygmy tribesman forced into slavery from his African home at the turn of the 19th century. After five years, he escapes into the Florida wilds, leaving his mentor and fellow slave, Samuel, and his slave master's son, Benjamin, with whom he has developed a kinship. Kau intends to live in nature, as he did as a member of the Ota tribe in Africa. Eventually, after numerous encounters along the way, Kau comes across a British fort on the Apalachicola River given to former slaves who were fighting along with the British during the War of 1812. Garcon, who has declared himself the general, takes Kau into their encampment. They intend to hold off the Americans who eventually attack the fort while Kau attempts to leave with others before imminent peril. VERDICT Horack follows up The Southern Cross, a collection of short stories, with a visceral and authentic account of a distinctive character and his quest for freedom. For some readers, this work may bring to mind Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain or Toni Morrison's Beloved.--Cristella Bond, Anderson P.L., IN

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2010
Five years after capture and enslavement in the American South, Kau, a pygmy tribesman, manages to escape. He flees into the wilder territories of unsettled Florida, an area still very much in dispute between Native Americans and white Americans, between runaway slaves and slave catchers, between black recruits to the British army to fight the War of 1812 and the white American military. Kau finds himself caught between cultures and clashes on an odyssey through the Florida swamplands, haunted by memories of his own tribe and family, struggling to reconcile the alliances and animosities among the warring black, red, and white tribes he encounters. He meets Native Americans fighting with and against encroaching white men, a family of freed blacks eking a life for themselves, and a mesmerizing former slave who commands a fort while leading a doomed mission. What Kau wants is to find a space in the wilderness that will return him to himself. Horack is masterful in rendering a story of a man whose singularity offers fresh perspective on a turbulent period in American history in an exceptionally evocative novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)