Raising Holy Hell

by Bruce Olds

Presents a fictional account of the life of John Brown, the devoted abolitionist whom some believe was a prime cause of the Civil War, through a combination of journal excerpts, newspaper articles, song, oral reminiscences, and folktales. Reprint.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Civil War, Historical, Novels

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Martin Zook · Rating 5 out of 5]

We know what John Brown didn't do. He didn't succeed is sparking a slave revolt that would have armed rebelling slaves up and down the Appalachia. We're not real sure if he did something else: helped spark the Civil War with his failed slave rebellion. And, we probably never will know the answers to many of the questions about Brown with the same certainty that we know other, documented, historical figures.

Brown operated out of his head, leaving almost no written record to study and mull over.

Thank goodness for Olds' insightful examination into this important ghost of American history.

Olds' imaginative narrative weaves the relatively few historical facts known about Brown's plans for the raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry with facts such as how slaves were repressed and tortured, and other historical events of and around Brown's life, to create what I think is the clearest picture of this man who "failed" at everything he did, except sparking the Civil War.

A pivotal question about Brown's actions at Harpers Ferry surrounds his original estimate of men necessary to succeed in arming slaves he anticipated would flock to the armory once he took control. On the night he and his men launched their attack, Brown was far short of those he thought he needed. So, the pivotal question is: what was his intent at that point?

Once Brown took possession of the armory, it soon became obvious that slaves from nearby were not going to respond as he originally anticipated, yet he stayed at the armory rather than escape despite the fact that he could have easily escaped. Why?

While imprisoned at Charles Town and awaiting trial, he conducted visits (we can't call them press conferences, but that in effect is what they were) with the press to get out his message, which amplified the intent behind the raid and fanned southern fears of a slave revolt. Was this part of a plan B that proved far more effective in setting the fire he intended? Or, was he just making it up as he went along and taking advantage of opportunities?

Neither Olds, nor historians, have enough information to answer these questions with certainty. Brown took the answers to the grave. But, if I'm reading Olds' text right, it's not unreasonable to connect the dots and arrive at a conclusion that Brown did have a plan B in mind, or at least he cast his lot with the raid and took advantage of events as they unfolded favorably to his cause.

Subsequent to reading Olds' text - I really can't label it either a novel or history - I read "historical" texts (biographies and essays) on Brown's life and his raid, and for my money, Olds' portrait seems the most accurate and the richest. It's worth noting that Olds drew from many of the same sources.

John Brown has been a special presence in my life for more than half a century now. On the way back from church to my grandmother's house in Charles Town, W.Va., as a boy I got the heebeejeebies walking by the historical marker commemorating the site of Brown's execution. That was before I knew who he was, or what he hadn't done, or what he had done. Some decades later, after traveling much of the world and the US as the son of a diplomat and as a journeyman newspaper reporter, I settled down and married in the Washington, DC area. My wife selected a house for us while I was on a business trip. When I returned, I discovered I would be living six, or so, miles due east of Harpers Ferry. I ride by it biking on the C&O canal and visit Harpers Ferry regularly chauffeuring my children to events. The wagon that took Brown to the scaffold and delivered his corpse was in our family for some time.

For whatever reason, Brown was some nebulous, haunting presence in my life. But at least that presence was given enough form after reading Olds' book to call it a ghost.

It would be inaccurate to promise satisfaction in reading this book. Olds' highly imaginative approach will not satisfy those more comfortable with a traditionally structured book, but this book best defines Brown, for my money.

[David Gillespie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1995, Bruce Old's Raising Holy Hell is a revisionist take on the life of radical abolitionist, John Brown. The style of the book is unique. Olds writes in short bursts of prose and from different perspectives: first person, third person, quotes from actual historical documents, and what appears to be an interview with Brown from beyond the grave. The stylization almost makes the novel the equivalent of a cheesy Arts and Entertainment crime documentary. Yet it works beautifully as it is an original approach, and Olds never loses sight of the depth of the events. Olds' prose is spare, but he uses archaic words and sentence structure combined with impressive poetic imagery to achieve a convincing historical analysis, as well as an engrossing story. The novel also resonates with the reader as presently this is a time of intense, political warfare in the United States, and this depiction of intense pre-Civil War passions and rhetoric should be disturbingly familiar with any reader who keeps up with the current political scene. Finally, Bruce Olds makes the reader understand the complexity of the issues. His final take on John Brown seems to be that he was an unpleasant, possibly insane religious zealot. Nevertheless, that religious zealot knew what the most important moral issue of his time was. In terms of my own writing, it is a goal of mine to eventually do a historical analysis within a historical fiction context, and to succeed in tying the themes of the past with the themes of today.

[Gail Katz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I absolutely hated reading this book. If it were not onethat had been selected by my Springfield Book Club, I would have cheerfully tossed it in the "reurn to Library" bag. I am grateful I did not purchase it! Holy Hell is rated as a 5 star read here -- so jump to another reader. I obviously did not "get" the book.

Things that make me dislike the book: Historical novel: A negative right off. The writer must do all the research of a biographer, but must also have an opinion on the historical time and people incolved.
2. This book is an exercise in taking a ovel format and totally wriecking it up, to make it seem like a poorly written script rather than a novel.
3. his verbiage, strange use of words, arbitrarily turning nouns and adjectives into verbs drove me nuts.
4. I started reading this book before a recent surgery and finished it in bits and pieces while under the influencce of various pain medications. It didn't seem to make a difference in my "aappreciation" of the book. I hated it equally on or off drugs.

[HillbillyMystic · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Brown, AKA Osawatamie Brown. Wow. I guess I never really heard his story before. He was quite mad in my humble opinion and a perfect example of religious zealotry coupled with self righteousness leading to murder, mayhem and terrorism. I find it interesting too how so many characters played into his downfall including Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth and Colonel Robert E. Lee. I used to avoid nonfiction due to being forced to learn boring dates and names throughout my public education years. Ever since I got out of college and got to choose what books I read I've leaned more towards fiction than anything else. However humans are much more sinister, brutal, strange and creepy in real life than fiction. It is just a matter of finding authors willing to tell the truth and not hogwash like two airplanes can cause three buildings to collapse at free fall speed.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well told. Old's narrative style is unique, jumping from P.O.V to P.O.V. and back and forth in time. It's neat.

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel which wears certain pomoisms proudly. Nonstandard, almost disorienting format, brief chapters - if they can be referred to as such - of varying style, which formulate both a critique and ode to John Brown. Olds to some extent overemphasizes and exaggerates Brown’s depravity and sado-masochism (implying his arousal moreso at being on the submissive end of such things, nonsexual enjoyment on the infliction and witnessing of such acts.) However, this particular element is not played with well enough to truly be interesting, rather coming up intermittently to remind the reader that this Brown might be a bit of a shady character. He seems almost like the prison boss of his family at points, rather than the biblical patriarch he is usually portrayed as. Taking joy in rhetorically trapping them on questions of abolition and abolitionist acts, finding their co-suffering exciting. Along with the implication that he himself shied away from committing violence personally, which is somewhat ridiculous, as while he may not have swung the sword at Kansas, he was more than happy to order and watch it. The attempts to demonize him (and somewhat correctly portray him as a religious nut) are largely forgotten as the end draws nearer, where the problem is less so a question of his beliefs or even his proposed strategy of violent action, it is more so an issue of his parody led plan at Harper’s Ferry. An interesting tactic of the book to help you “understand” brown (while I don’t know much about Olds, given some of the opinions expressed in this work, he is doubtlessly a liberal) is by intermingling quotes about treatment of slaves and the bleak views held regarding them with sections of narrative. This creates a sort of agitation which gets one angrier and angrier, thus making Brown’s actions - while perhaps condemnable - comprehensible to the average moronic liberal, whose beginning and ending of interacting with history is “understanding” those individuals they consider in somewhat misguided or outright evil - brown, the man from mars in liberal consciousness, makes the primo choice of subject. I still ultimately prefer Cloudsplitter as an exploration of Brown - for one, it interacts with Brown more at his level, and does not needlessly make him out to be malicious, moreso misguided. Still, an interesting read for its narrative structure and prose alone, filled with archaic terminology and fun chime-ins from Brown himself, giving the feel of some trash TV show.

[Matt Wright · Rating 1 out of 5]

Please don’t take this book to be any sort of accurate depiction of John Brown the man who lived. The character presented in this odd work of fiction is only partially, and rarely, an accurate representation of Brown. Olds has an apparent agenda and it colors his depiction of his subject fairly blatantly. The opening scene is odd and the final page is worse:

“To his children, final letter:
Dear family:
I admonish you always to remember—
Be good haters.”

Nothing like this ever appears in Brown’s writing, unless you want to consult confederate propaganda, which I fear Olds validates far more than he intends.

It’s a creative work, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Try any other biography or work on Brown before this if you want to know the real story.

[Avi · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting concept of attempting to write a historical fiction novel of John Brown’s life from his perspective. It certainly has its moments of power and even insight into the man, but unfortunately, much of this is subsumed between a narrative that jumps and cuts and tries to be too cute in places that it undermines the thrust and power of the plot.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's the verbs.


Check this out:

"He hawkeyes the horizon qnd bloodhounds the terrain, yea-leaving the scat, calibrates the configuration of the clouds, calculates the phases of the moon, ciphers the spectacle of the sun--the intentions pentimentoed in each of its sunset colors.
"His beard snowfalls past his sternum.
"His toes protrude from his heel-worn boots."

Adjectives so often are forced the heavy-lifting in colorful writing, when they don't have the strength. Verbs are harder to change, but so much more powerful. And Olds knows it. Not that all of the passages are so dense with unusual verbs--they would lose some their power, stand int he way of description rathe than making it richer. It's called prose for a reason. But some stand out. I especially remember blood roostertailing from the head of Senator Charles Sumner after being hit caned by representative Preston Brooks. The book is full of such descriptive niceties. It is very clear that Olds was influenced by Michael S. Harper's "History as Cap'n Brown." References to the poem are sprinkled throughout the text.

Olds is also a poet by concision. Raising Holy Hell come out three years before Russell Bank's doorstop of a book, Cloudsplitter, which covered the same subject--the life and times of the abolitionist John Brown--and condenses a hundred-pages of Banks into ten pages with no loss of nuance but the addition of voices.

Because that's the other thing notable about this book, in addition to the verbs: its kaleidoscopic structure.

After a brief prologue about John Brown on the verge of breakdown, Olds shifts to a discussion of human biology--particularly the role of melanocytes in the formation of the integument--and then to a graphic discussion of the Middle Passage. Soon we are flashing again between John Brown's childhood, and then the commentary of his first wife. The book is written almost like a filmed documentary, with interviews--even interviews of the dead--and transcripts of speeches and important court cases. There's something of John Dos Passos in it, but also something more, as characters sometimes directly address the readers. We learn a lot in a little space.

I wouldn't necessarily go to this book to the learn the true and right history of John Brown. I'm not up on the exact facts, and Olds did lean on the excellent biographer Stephen Oates (haven't read Oates on Brown, but did on Lincoln and Faulkner, but recommended)--so it may be that the facts here are all correct. But the language is sometimes clearly anachronistic--maybe on purpose, maybe not. Having Abraham Lincoln, for example, complain about muddying the gene pool makes no sense in terms of nineteenth-century theories of inheritance. And some might resist the seeming biological reductionism of the first part: it's not all because of the melanocytes.

But the book is still enlightening. It reminds us that those we saw as the good guys weren't really so good. Lincoln was quite content to leave slavery alone, just not let it expand, and absolutely no one wanted freed slaves given equality--segregation or deportation was the order of the day. Except for John Brown, who foresaw a time of mixed races, who warned that neither segregation nor deportation would work, but only cause more misery.

Olds is, as one would hope in a (fictional) biography of John Brown, especially good on his main character. He touches on his nasty father, his hatred of the patriarch, and then the way he emulated him in the end. But he doe snot reduce the story to one of a man with a bad father. He touches on Brown's desire for business success and his repeated failures, questions why Brown took so long to become an active abolitionist and the crazily unrealistic plans he hatched. We get a sense of the man as motivated by different factors, some stronger at times, some weaker, and also the chance to marvel at the mystery of him, too, how hard he could be: and how hard his religion made him.

I only wish that we had gotten more of the interaction with his own sons, for their role int he story is no longer clear--indeed, at times they seemed to drive the story, going to (Bloody) Kansas before him, one even becoming a politician for the free-soil party.

The book culminates--as it should--in a long set piece that describes Brown's loss at Harper's Ferry. Even the chapters are a bit longer here--most of the book, they run one to three pages, but here they sometimes double that--and the time spent here is about a third of the book. It is well done and interesting fulfilling the the tragic trajectory on which Brown--and, Olds implies, the entire country--had set itself from his--or its--birth.

[Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I loved the collage-like style of the narrative. It moved me, engaged me, and gave me a stronger feeling of accord with the subject's era than a more conventional history book. I do not think that this should be the definitive style for popular history, but I can't deny that I am more likely to become engaged in the time and personalities if they are approached artfully and evocatively. This book does that.

I have been to Harpers Ferry on several occasions, and each time I go, I am struck by a feeling that the place is haunted by the spirit of a true madman. John Brown was on the right side of history; he set in motion a cataclysm the righted the horrendous wrong of slavery; he had a deep sympathy for the injustices done to his fellow men.... and he was also an obsessive, delusional mass murderer whose visions of a divinely inspired African-American uprising would prove to have more in common with the prophecies of Charles Manson than the dreams of Martin Luther King.

I loved the book. Helped me to realize that not only can "Good things can be done for evil reasons", but also that "Evil things can be done for good reasons." And that's not an easy idea to get across.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raising Holy Hell by Bruce Olds was quite an interesting read. It was a historical fiction piece about John Brown. In Kansas, he's somewhat of a folk hero. I wanted to read this to get a better picture of who he was. This book was a great exploration of that. Through letters, through news articles, and through the stories of those closest to him, this pieces together a picture of him from a variety of angles. It talks about all the tragedy in his family, including lots of death. It talks about the methods he used, many of which were quite violent. It talks about where he found allies, as well as where he encountered enemies. When looking at a figure like this, there can be many narratives, and I appreciated that this one shared many of them. I also really liked the storytelling methods used. The variety of mediums allowed me to gain more of an understanding of how he has been both celebrated and critiqued. It wasn't the type of book I usually read, but I learned a great deal more of John Brown's story and history in general.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an ambitious, surreal, furious, spellbinding novel. Does it read, on occasion, like too much of a Cormac McCarthy or (more often) Ron Hansen (Olds's habit of making verbs of nouns -- not to mention the tone he strikes in inventorying the mythic tics and quirks of his protagonist -- is a page right out of Hansen's repertoire) knock-off? Perhaps. But a more accurate assessment would be that Raising Holy Hell reads like a novel written by the child of McCarthy and Hansen while in the midst of some delirium or fever. Olds's prose is as much an ecstatic homage to these two writers as it is a deep bow to its subject, John Brown, and the book feels less written than pulled from the belly of a furnace. When all is said and done, what's not to love about that?

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tells the story of John Brown, the staunch abolitionist, who led a raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, for which he was ultimately captured and hanged. While I knew of him, I certainly knew little about him. His story is told in this novel, which is an odd mix of narrative, journal entries, newspaper entries, quotations from contemporaries and family members, collaborators and haters, and even poetry. This writing style is confusing at times, making it difficult to separate fact from fiction. Worth reading for a glimpse of the time leading up to the Civil War, especially as the opinions of our leaders were not as noble toward emancipation and race as we would like to believe.

[Jerrold · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gripping re-telling of historical events in the form of fictionalized first person accounts. I'm unsure of the historical accuracy, but it unfolds more like a well-told history lesson than fiction. Having said that, It still engulfed me from the first few pages, and never let go. Granted, you must be interested in the subject matter ( slavery, early American politics, race and culture, and examinations of spiritual and religious ideologies), but it is a good read full of mystery and suspense, even when some of the events come pouring back to you from middle school history lessons. One of my favorite reads.

[Jennifer W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially I had a difficult time following the story as Olds chose to write it, but I quickly got over it and enjoyed it the more for it. The only place where I again found myself having a difficult time follow what was happening was on the raid of Harper's Ferry itself. A map of the grounds or some sort of time frame would have been nice. That aside, it was a well written story that provided many angles and views of John Brown as well as the mood of the nation at that time.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't get enough of John Brown. Who can? Olds blows out of the chute as wild as God's Vengeance on bloody Kansas. First scene: JB trudging out to the barn in the dead of winter to lash the sins out of himself. This is historical fiction in multiple genres: political quotes, court transcripts, poems, narrative, lists, and JB's God-possessed consciousness. The pages fly, even when Olds tries too hard to out-McCarthy Mccarthy with the archaic language.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is about John Brown, the man best known for his failed attempt to raid the armory at Harper's Ferry. While I admire his single-mindedness about ending slavery in America,I am also challenged by it. He was a religious fanatic. This book gave me a clear picture of a very intense person, someone who I admire but am troubled by.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first book I ever read that was considered historical fiction and it truly stuck with me. I blindly chose it in college from a list of reading choices based soley on the cover. I love the narration and finished it in a weekend because I was so engrossed. I would recommend Bruce Olds to anyone even slightly intrigued by the topics of his books!

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful historical novel about the often misunderstood John Brown.

[Sethlind · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell yes.

[Alisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I try not to give up on a book, but this just wasn't my thing. I think I made it to page fifty before I gave up.

[Sean Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful stuff. This is my favorite book.

[Teresa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dark and depressing, I finally decided to not keep reading and move onto something else.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating perspective on the life of John Brown and his role in shaping our history. The book is literate and sometimes in-your-face.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing style gave this book a wonderful texture that was great to read and the more prose-style sections were filled with gorgeous language.

[graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn your eyes...

[Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite historical fiction book about John Brown. If I still taught American Lit, I'd include this one on the list. I love the structure of this book!

[Scott Schmidt · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

[Collin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun and interesting narrative. A mix of historical fiction and nonfiction about the famous John Brown, who recognized and acted decisively to liberate millions. A true patriot.