Synopses & Reviews
A stunning and lyrical Civil War thriller,
Walking to Gatlinburg is a spellbinding story of survival, wilderness adventure, mystery, and love in the time of war.
Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession.
It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile, the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence, Jesse is murdered, and thus begins Morgan’s unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem.
Along the way, Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters, including a weeping elephant, a pacifist gunsmith, a woman who lives in a tree, a blind cobbler, and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time, he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him – how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith, how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange, Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.
Synopsis
A stunning and lyrical Civil War thriller,
Walking to Gatlinburg is a spellbinding story of survival, wilderness adventure, mystery, and love in the time of war.
Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession.
It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile, the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence, Jesse is murdered, and thus begins Morgan’s unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem.
Along the way, Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters, including a weeping elephant, a pacifist gunsmith, a woman who lives in a tree, a blind cobbler, and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time, he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him – how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith, how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange, Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.
Synopsis
A stunning and lyrical Civil War novel, "Walking to Gatlinburg" is a story of brotherhood and survival, action and adventure, in an unforgettable and mythic trek into an American heart of darkness as a boy searches for the brother he's lost.
About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books. His novel A Stranger in the Kingdom won the New England Book Award for Fiction and was made into a movie, as were his novels Disappearance and Where the Rivers Flow North. A recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Mosher lives in Vermont.
Reading Group Guide
A NOTE TO THE READER
In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of this book—as well as the ending. If you have not finished reading Walking to Gatlinburg, we respectfully suggest that you may want to wait before reviewing this guide.
1.
Walking to Gatlinburg is rooted deeply in the world of nature. How is nature presented in the story? What impact do the forces of nature have on different characters?
2. Howard Frank Mosher describes himself as a novelist who utilizes history, and sometimes even invents it, in order to tell a fictional story. He reports that, before retracing Morgan Kinneson’s epic journey south, or doing his extensive research on the Civil War, he wrote a first draft of Walking to Gatlinburg. This approach sounds counterintuitive. Why might a novelist write a draft of a history-based novel before doing in-depth research on the period and places in which the novel is set?
3. Several “real-life” characters play minor roles in Walking to Gatlinburg, including President Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Do you find them believable? Would you have preferred to see them developed more fully?
4. Joseph Findletter, the Pennsylvania Dutch gunsmith who makes Morgan’s rifle, Lady Justice, cites an Amish proverb: “Better an unjust peace than a just war.” Morgan responds that his brother Pilgrim would agree but that he doesn’t. How do you interpret these opposing views in light of the Civil War? In light of the wars that the U.S. is currently fighting?
5. Do you think that the Civil War was inevitable? Why or why not? Has reading Walking to Gatlinburg changed your understanding of the Civil War?
6. Slidell suggests that Jesse’s runic stone may have been given to their African ancestors by Vikings. Howard Frank Mosher reports that during the composition of Walking to Gatlinburg, he “cast the runes” twice. Coincidentally or otherwise, he selected “Nauthiz” both times. Why do you think he decided to make “Nauthiz” Morgan’s rune?
7. Decades ago, Howard Mosher wrote a graduate thesis on Shakespeare’s villains. He reports that he has always been fascinated by villains in literature and, moreover, that the psychopathic killer Ludi Too in Walking to Gatlinburg is based closely on his own insane great, great grandfather. Do you have a favorite fictional villain? What do you think makes for a great villain?
8. Walking to Gatlinburg features two star-crossed love stories. Did you find the revelation in the epilogue of the novel that Slidell married Auguste Choteau instead of Morgan saddening? Why do you think Howard Mosher decided not to have Slidell and Morgan marry?
9. Of all of Morgan’s challenges, which do you think may be his greatest?
10. Does Pilgrim “have to die” in the final shoot-out with Ludi? Would the story have been more satisfying to you if he had not been killed?
11. The epilogue also reveals that Morgan not only follows Gen. Robert E. Lee’s advice to him to pursue the law as a profession, he becomes Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Based on what you know about Morgan from his long walk to Gatlinburg in 1864, do you think that he would make a wise and capable Chief Justice?
12. Morgan Kinneson believes that slavery is “the most evil of all human institutions.” Do you agree?
13. Three of Howard Frank Mosher’s previous books have been made into films. If you were writing a screen play of Walking to Gatlinburg, what scenes would you focus on? What actors would you consider for the principal roles