The Edge of Hell
Nate Calhoun and James Keenan can’t help egging each other on. At a dance in their hometown of Burr Oak, Michigan, James makes a point of asking Nate’s girl Katie to dance. Nate gets the better of James, embarrassing him in front of his father in the mercantile the Keenans own and operate.
After joining the 11th Michigan regiment of the Union Army in 1863, the two soon become fast friends, their relationship forged in the drudgery of infantry life and the dangers of battle. The two see action in battles at Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the march to Atlanta. Then Nate is captured by Confederate rebels and sent to Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia, and James does everything he can, risking a charge of desertion, to free him.
K. Keogh is author of three novels involving the swashbuckling Jack Mallory as well as a novel of plantation life and love. In The Edge of Hell she takes readers to the front lines of battle and the trenches where combatants huddle in mud, awash in seas of rain water, pulling meager rations from their packs. She recounts the horrors of the prison camp where prisoners fight one another for rations and sticks from portions of old stockade walls to use as firewood.
“Edge of hell” is the only way to describe where the Civil War took James and Nate and the men of the 11th Michigan.
