Shiloh

Philip Fracassi knows how to paint hell on earth. His Civil War novella Shiloh throws us into the blood-soaked mud alongside Henry, a Confederate soldier whose soul has already been claimed by war’s brutality. As Henry tells us, “You don’t wash with another man’s blood and expect to get clean.”

Fracassi knows how to write a battle scene. His prose crackles with musket fire and the wet thud of lead finding flesh. Artillery doesn’t just fire, it makes “the world fill with thunder and an erupting barrage of gunfire.” You feel those earth-shaking explosions in your teeth.

As the fight wears on, the supernatural bleeds naturally into the carnage. When Henry sees a towering brute with skin like leather and a spear the size of a pine tree, we’re not sure if it’s shell shock or genuine evil. Does it matter? Both explanations terrify.

Fracassi compresses the backstory—a tobacco farm, two hundred acres, preacher father, brothers bound by blood and bullets—while stretching each moment of combat until your nerves fray. Every creeping advance is a potential ambush leaving the soldiers to “pray the scouts who’ve run ahead are keen-eyed and not throat-slit.”

Yet, the story’s biblical parallels feel underdeveloped. The supernatural elements, while effective, could use more room to breathe. You sense a larger, more ambitious story trapped inside this compact frame. Thematically, it follows Fracassi’s short story, “King Mob,” which also felt constrained, so there’s hope Fracassi revisits this idea for a future work.

That said, Shiloh succeeds as a brutal meditation on war’s soul-destroying power. Fracassi has genuine talent for visceral storytelling. He just hasn’t quite found the perfect vessel for this vision.

Not yet, anyway.