The Alligators of Abraham Author:Robert Kloss Fiction. Robert Kloss's THE ALLIGATORS OF ABRAHAM is a fever dream built from the fly strewn corpses of armies, the megalomania of generals, the madness of widows, the fires of mourning, the fury of the poor, the indifference of the wealthy, and the ravenous hissing of those alligators who have ever plagued the shores of our national nightmares.... more » With a cover design and interior illustrations by Matt Kish (author of Tin House's Moby-Dick in Pictures), this is a Civil War epic unlike any other.
"In The Alligators of Abraham, Robert Kloss drops us into the darkness of the Civil War, showing a culture perpetually on the edge of extinction. Yet out of that murky world, hazed and fogged, rise the clear and distinct shapes of a people not ready to surrender to their own haunting. A novel as lyrical as it is precise in its depiction of the struggle to maintain dignity." - Adam Braver, author of Mr. Lincoln's Wars and November 22, 1963
"Robert Kloss's words gnaw into the collective-dark-underbelly-unconsciousness of the 19th century which, in many ways, we've never entirely gotten over in America. They get how the 'you' of America is both masculine and tender, how it's powered by craziness and wounds, and how it longs to liberate and yet remains enslaving and enslaved. They understand how war roils in the guts. There is a terrible, terrible movie in which Shirley Temple meets Abraham Lincoln. This book is a gristly bloody opposite of that; it reeks of the truth." - Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances« less