Fulanita Number 3 is a contemporary novel about a subject I felt compelled to write about, the criminal trafficking of children for sexual purposes. Yes, it’s quite a departure from Civil War fiction. But I felt the need to call attention to this rampant evil which has become so widespread that few communities, if any, in this great and affluent nation can truthfully say, “It’s not happening here.” The story is set in the beautiful low-country of South Carolina, a coastline of wide sandy beaches, maze-like inland waterways, bountiful farms and ranches, and world-famous golf courses, all rich with generations-old Southern charm and pride. The storyline is based on factual accounts of minors who were trafficked in various places across this country, who were delivered from the bondage inflicted upon them, and eventually were able to overcome evil with faith, hope, and love.
An Eye for Glory, my first novel, was named a Christy Award Finalist for First Novel and a Publisher’s Weekly Top Inspirational Pick in 2011. It was published by Zondervan, the Harper-Collins subsidiary for Christian literature. I told the story of Michael Palmer as I thought he would have written it. I experimented with first person and third person points of view, and quickly settled on first person, because Michael’s story was an intensely personal one, a man writing to his grown children twenty years after he enlisted. I read diaries of soldiers from the war, as much for the historical content as for the use of language, from which I developed Michael’s manner of writing and speaking. An Eye for Glory is set in the documented history of the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry because the 14th was involved in all of the battles of the Army of the Potomac from Antietam to Appomattox. I also lived in Connecticut while I wrote this book.
Until Shiloh Comes, Prairie Dog Town, and The Gates of Sheol comprise The Shiloh Trilogy. Stanley Mitchell, a green recruit from Ohio, is severely wounded during the battle of Shiloh, Tennessee. He is found near death by Mrs. Matthews, a local woman. Despite her own loss of her husband and son in the war, she takes Stanley into her home and nurses him back to health. But Stanley is left with a serious disability. Until Shiloh Comes is a story about love, about Stanley’s learning to to give and receive love, and love among the members of the two families on the farm, one white, one black. It is a story of honor and loyalty. It is a story of personal choices and their consequences. And it’s the story of the fight to save Stanley from the grief-fueled hatred of Southerners who would rather kill a Yankee than allow him to live among them.
Prairie Dog Town is about Stanley’s ordeals and experiences in and around Vicksburg, Mississippi. A captive of an evil slave trader, Stanley is sold down the river to serve as a slave laborer on a riverboat. He finds a friend in an educated black man along the river. The man helps him find his way back to Vicksburg just before the Union Army besieges the city. After the city falls, Stanley is taken back into the Union Army and it seems he will never return to the Matthews farm near Shiloh.
The Gates of Sheol will take you inside the notorious prison stockade at Andersonville, Georgia. Violence and disease claim the lives of scores of men every day and Stanley must endure long months of deprivation while he exists on meager food and putrid water. Hopes of deliverance by Sherman’s army grow only to be dashed again and again, until the war finally ends and Stanley stumbles through the open gates toward freedom.
Karl A. Bacon - Author 
