On November 15, 1864, Sherman marched out of a burning Atlanta with about 62,000 men and cut himself off from his own supply line—a thing armies were not supposed to do. No base. No telegraph. No line of retreat. The army would feed itself off the Georgia countryside and emerge at Savannah, three hundred miles away, or it wouldn’t emerge at all.

The army moved in two wings on parallel roads, spreading across a front that widened to sixty miles. In Howl, Mobb watches the columns from a ridge east of the city and sees not an army but a migration—infantry, cavalry, artillery, wagons, cattle, and within the first mile, freed people falling in behind the columns carrying bundles and children, wearing an expression he can’t name. Years later he decides the expression was belief.

Sherman’s stated goal was to make Georgia howl—his word, and my title. To demonstrate that the Confederacy could not protect its own interior, and to break the will that sustained the armies in the field. He ordered only military targets destroyed. Fire, as fire does, spread. The boundary between military and civilian destruction, always theoretical, dissolved in the smoke.

Here’s the thing the histories tend to skip, and the thing I built this novel on: a sixty-mile-wide front isn’t a wall. It’s two columns with a corridor between them and a wake behind them, where the army’s passage collapsed all authority. In those spaces—farms, swamps, pine barrens—there was no law at all. What moved through those spaces is what Howl is about.

The book is on Amazon. https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ