My Review of Sheldon Russell's A FORGOTTEN EVIL (Cynren Press).

I have just finished reading A FORGOTTEN EVIL. Let me put my response in context. As a farm boy in eastern Oklahoma I read Hamlin Garland's BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE and was astounded that someone could make literature out of something I knew so well. Literature could really be about what I knew as real life. What Sheldon Russell has done in A FORGOTTEN EVIL is far better. More profoundly and more simply than any historical novelist I have ever read, he shows his hero living his life among 19th century flora, fauna, foodstuffs, tools, weapons, physical pleasures and pains, customs, &c. Not once does Russell pause, as so many historical novelists do, to hold up a tiny gem he or she trusts is unfamiliar to us and ask us to marvel at the deep historical research required to uncover such gems and the cleverness to display them casually. A FORGOTTEN EVIL is a different kind of historical novel. I see that Russell is scheduled to talk at the Oklahoma Genealogical Society on "Researching for the Historical Novel" in a few months from now, November 11, 2019. Perhaps that session will be published, but for now I go by the product. Throughout the book, it feels as if the writer has lived himself convincingly into a now lost world. This is a remarkable achievement. I know how hard it is to achieve, because, transcribing hundreds of family letters, studying thousands of documents, I tried hard to depict Herman Melville's life in two long volumes. I think in this book Russell succeeded better than I managed to do. I did not have to master believable 19th century idioms (I could quote them) and I did not myself have to be witty in sayings and in badinage. My cap is off to Russell--for the depth of his research, for his wit and for his restraint. Now, as a Glenn and a Tucker, names notorious from the Glenn-Tucker Lawsuit which resulted in the Bureau of Indian Affairs preserving hundreds of affidavits by my mistreated kinfolks, I have vested interest in the treatment of American Indians. As a Melville scholar I will never forgive the arrogant young George Armstrong Custer for murdering six of John Singleton Mosby's men instead of treating them as prisoners of war. I was uneasy when I saw on the back cover that Custer was a character in the book. I applaud the way Sheridan and Custer are mentioned before one of them is depicted. I applaud the great restraint with which Sand Creek is mentioned and dropped. I honor Russell for his masterful ending at the Washita River. This is a historical novel in which the author achieves his most powerful effects by his exercise of restraint. Think how hard that must have been to do.