Hecatomb

New York: Simon and Schuster. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. (c.1965). First Edition. Hardcover. [nice tight clean copy, minor shelfwear to lower extremities, the teensiest bit of fraying to cloth at lower rear corner; the jacket shows light handling wear only]. An ambitious novel "that takes you into the creation, the execution and the climax of a modern revolution, that lays bare the relity and the myth of the decisive act of twentieth-century politics." Although set in an fictional Latin American country during the 1920s, the book presents an historically-informed "understanding of the forces, the motives and the compulsive ambitions that create and sustain" a revolution. (The title refers to an ancient Greek tradition that involved the ritual public slaughter of one hundred oxen; in the book, it's recast as a threat by the country's dictator to have one hundred innocent men, women and children executed during each hour that the revolution continues.) Kirkus Reviews judged it "a brilliantly conceived melodrama." Palmer (1932-2014) began as a novelist -- he turned out five novels, including this one, in a creative spurt between 1959 and 1965 -- but with one exception ("They Shall Not Pass," 1971), he subsequently toiled in other fields, notably juvenile history (two books about notable Civil War battles, published in 1965 and 1967) and various dietary- and health-related topics in the 1970s. For his fiction, he was drawn to historical backgrounds (or in this case, quasi-faux-historical); several of his other novels had setting that included the Spanish Civil War the American Civil War, and the Indian wars of the Southeast. .