SOURCE: Mayer, Henry. “Suffocating Virtue.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (8 March 1998): 3.

In the following review, Mayer commends Banks's “mesmerizing” portrayal of John Brown in Cloudsplitter but notes that the work should not be categorized as a traditional historical novel.

Of all the cultural puzzlements I encountered when moving as a seventh-grader from the Bronx to eastern North Carolina in 1953, the most curious was the way my new friends and neighbors would say that they couldn't get the “John Brown'd” thing to work or that they would be “John Brown'd” before they'd do something they didn't like. At first it seemed like gibberish; then I made the naive substitution of thinking they meant “hanged” and only gradually did it dawn on me that the expression was a grim and profane oath that meant, literally, damned by God and sent to roast in hell.

Nearly a century after the old...