book cover of The Candle Man
 

The Candle Man

(2024)
A novel by

 
 
In 1863, during the Battle of Chancellorsville inside the Yankee works, Confederate Private Glendon Fayte receives a mortal wound as a cannon ball takes away his shoulder. Before he dies, in an effort to quench his hellish thirst, he takes a bottle of liquid from a dying Union captain and drinks the entire thing. Immediately strong and powerful, he kills a Yankee sergeant who attacked him. Fayte then blacked out. When he awakens, his wound is healed to the point that there is no evidence of the wound on his body. The scars from earlier battle wounds have disappeared as well, and even scars he received as a child are gone. He learns that with only half the men as the Yankees, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia decisively won the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fayte also learns that when his fellow soldiers came upon him he was well into eating that Yankee sergeant he killed, and was only stopped by his comrades beating him unconscious with rifle butts. He is also informed that his corps commander, General Stonewall Jackson, has ordered his brigade commander, General Lane, to hustle Fayte out of the CSA and out of the battlefield area. Chancellorsville is considered Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory to date, but not if the newspapers make Fayte's apparent cannibalism the headline. He is discharged from the AVN and sent to Richmond to a friend of General Lane’s, a physician named Walter Morgan who makes Fayte his assistant.While there Glendon Fayte discovers and develops the new powers he has which, in addition to time travel and shape shifting, now include immortality, mind reading, thought placement, killing with but a thought, incredible strength, and even telekinesis. It is as though all he needs to have a power is to want it. He has the power to change the outcome of battles and even the war itself and determines to do so. Fayte's unlikely and at first reluctant companion on his subsequent journey is the narrator of Glendon Fayte's story, Doctor Morgan's slave Clay. It is an adventure beginning with the American Revolution and continuing to the 2024 eclipse that, among other questions, answers the oft heard plea, "If there is a god, why does he allow such horrible things to happen?" .


Genre: Science Fiction

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