"A virtuoso of the battlefield, Forrest thus enters Civil War mythology as a symbol of sanguinary slaughter and imperious leadership, “a tyrannical, hotheaded vulgarian,” as one soldier on his own side put it. Lafcadio Hearn, who reported on Forrest’s funeral, said he was “one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilization.” But it’s just that image that Madison Smartt Bell, a Southerner born in Nashville, intends to complicate in his latest novel, “Devil’s Dream."