In 1993, the battle of Mogadishu was the most intense combat Americans
had engaged in since Vietnam. In this adrenaline-filled debut novel,
Matthew Eck puts readers inside the mind of a young man caught in the
fog of unexpected attack.
When a small unit of soldiers from the U.S. Army is separated from
their command and left for dead, their only option is to keep moving,
in hope that they will escape the marauding gangs and clansmen who
appear to rule the city. After a series of horrifying, often violent
encounters along the way, only a few of them survive. In this short war
novel, the characters, both natives and invaders alike, are
haunting—almost inhuman—and the emerging story reflects a new kind of
military engagement, with all the attendant horrors and difficulties.
Matthew Eck enlisted in the Army in 1992 and served in Somalia and
Haiti. He has a BA in English Literature from Wichita State University
and received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of
Montana. He currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the
University of Central Missouri. He lives in Kansas City.
Awards:
Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35
Quotes:
“Matthew Eck is a natural novelist and a war novelist by accident.
His book is ghostly, lyrical and strange in the style of the young Tim
O’Brien, but with a difference: Eck’s . . . wandering soldiers are even
further from home, like Beckett characters stranded in coastal Africa.
This is the first novel that I’ve read to capture today’s postmodern
political warfare, waged in the inexplicable locales for even more
inexplicable reasons and with rules of engagement that make no sense.”
—Walter Kirn
"What
Mr. Eck achieves in focusing attention on the identifying details of
his setting is solidarity with post-Somalia soldiers, those who
participate in post-September 11, 2001, conflicts and this new,
post-modern style of warfare. The moral and logistical chaos of that
experience — in all its terrifying specificity — is what will resonate,
echoing Bowden's predictions [in Black Hawk Down] with terrible clarity."—New York Sun
“Heir to Hemingway, and damn near as powerful as Cormac McCarthy in The
Road (2006), Eck has created a contemporary version of The Red Badge of
Courage in this tale of one young man’s trial by fire in the
pandemonium of war in an age of high-tech weaponry and low-grade
morality.” —Booklist (STARRED REVIEW)
“In such novels as The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien perfected the
art of nuanced war fiction. Eck follows in his footsteps, emphasizing
not the drama of the soldier’s ordeal, but the painstaking,
spirit-breaking, heart-wrenching details. A harrowing work that conveys
chaos, confusion and raw fear.” —Kirkus
“Eck goes beyond the on-the-ground chaos of battle to capture the
physical and psychological disorientation of modern war.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It is no accident that Matthew Eck’s outstanding novel transports his
American characters into a landscape—and a moral universe—that seems
only a border crossing away from Camus’ Algeria. This novel is a
blazing record of the future and of Eck’s exceptional abilities as a
novelist.” —Whitney Terrell, author of The King of Kings County
