"This elegant book, in the tradition of The Red Badge of Courage, is a quick read of enduring impact."

"Exciting . . . a grueling adventure."
---New York Times Book Review

"With a horse like this, you just want to ride. And with the descriptive power such as he displays here, Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one--in lean prose, reminiscent of Crane's Red Badge of Courage, with just the proper amount of sharp description. The special flavor Olmstead lends to the tale seems to come from a mix of ancient myth and our bloody history, and a kind of pastoral vision... The characters seem to spring up out of these surroundings, universal and yet specifically lifelike, adding to a story that lingers in the mind like a faded song about a boy and his horse from Childs' mountain home."

"Robey 's journey is at once fast-moving yet carefully measured, a riveting tale of the American past and a brilliantly realized journey into the heart of darkness... It's the kind of novel that you will want to read once simply for the storytelling... Then you will want to read it again to let Olmstead's prose wash over you. It's as muscular, sturdy, well hewn, and wise as the coal-black horse himself."

"Olmstead has the skill for lending every present moment an extraordinary, sensuous glow."

"Olmstead's writing is energized by the tensions between different ways of looking at the world.... The reader wants it to go on indefinitely --or to start all over again."
---The New Yorker

"Robert Olmstead is an original in the American grain.... From the world of his work ---muscular and male---he has fashioned a fresh and vital language."

"Robert Olmstead's fable COAL BLACK HORSE is deft, moving, intensely readable and just about tone perfect."

"Coal Black Horse" is a mesmerizing descent into the hypnotic and violent hell of war. Olmstead has given us another spare and brilliant story of family, allegiance, and love."

The Civil War turns a boy into a man in Olmstead's latest novel (after Stay Here with Me, 1996, etc.)

In 1863, a woman on a farm in the mountains, far removed from battle, has a premonition that tells her the war is over. The fighting might continue, but she knows that the outcome has been decided. She wants her husband to come home, and she sends her 14-year-old son to find him. Since Robey knows that this quest means the end of his childhood, he doesn't want to go. And his mother doesn't want to send him, but both have fated roles in this austere, elegiac fairy tale. Like all folkloric heroes, Robey is given gifts to help him on his journey, but the greatest is the coal black horse. The boy is smart enough to know that the horse is smarter than he is, and he allows the animal to be his protector and guide. As he travels across a country at war with itself, Robey sees chaos and carnage-not just soldiers killed by soldiers, but families murdered by unknown killers and women and girls brutalized by bestial men. The actual battlefield is a bedlam of dead men, dying men and scavengers who do not distinguish between the two. Olmstead juxtaposes scenes of man made desolation with quietly lyrical depictions of the landscape and the animals who inhabit it-including the coal black horse-but he doesn't sharpen the contrast between disparate phenomena so much as he evinces a primordial universe: a time before gods, before morality, a time in which war is as natural and inevitable as birdsong in the morning. If the story ends on a hopeful note, it's not because Robey has found redemption or meaning-neither is available in the world to which he's traveled. It is because, while death is relentless and indomitable, life is, too.  Powerful and poetic.

"Sparsely told and graphically depicted, Robey's journey is a small-scale epic that will find a
broad audience in...fans of Civil War historical fiction."

A coming-of-age story whose grim background is the Civil War, this work by Olmstead (River Dog: Stories) follows 14-year-old Robey Childs on his quest to locate his father, a soldier in that war. His mother's premonition sets him on the journey, with no money, no clear direction, and just a worn-out horse to ride. Robey's fortune in coming across an extraordinary horse to accompany him is soon cancelled when the horse is violently taken from him, and he experiences privation and sorrow as he tries to reconnect with the horse and locate his dying father on the battlefield. Sparsely told and graphically depicted, Robey's journey is a small-scale epic that will find a broad audience in public library fans of Civil War historical fiction.

Olmstead's new work (after Stay Here with Me) is a convulsive, bloody Civil War tale that tracks a boy's search for his father on the battlefield at Gettysburg. At 14, Robey Childs is on the cusp of manhood when he sets off from the family farm at his mother's behest to find his soldier father and bring him home. A sympathetic farmer loans Robey an uncommonly beautiful and sturdy black horse. On the road, Robey passes carts carrying the maimed and dead, and bands of Native Americans and runaway slaves. A chain of horrific trials begins for Robey when a man dressed as a woman shoots him and steals the horse. He's taken prisoner as a suspected spy, witnesses a girl's rape and is caught up in a carnage-drenched raid. However, he survives the attack, is reunited with the stolen horse and sets out again, days later finding his father on the battlefield, mortally wounded. Robey can't save his father, but he can try to save the raped girl, Rachel, from further violence. His return home and his testimony to what he saw forms a powerful, redemptive narrative.(Apr.)