A War Memoir Wrapped in Myth - an Editorial Review of "A Coin for Charon"

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Editorial Review:

Some books grab you with their polish and others with their raw intensity. "A Coin For Charon: And My Journey to Find A Home" by W. Mace is firmly in the second camp. It’s a war memoir wrapped in myth, a confession wrapped in violence, and, somehow, also a meditation on the gods, memory, and survival. It’s not a neat narrative, but then again, war isn’t neat. Maybe that’s the point.

One of the first passages that stopped me in my tracks was this:

“On a decorative braided leather cord of twisted copper and leather, loosely tied around my neck and should such be necessary, there upon that tether hung my gold coin for Charon. A payment it was to ferry me across the River Styx into that enshrouded twisting fogged ground that I had espied in the distance... when entering the vessel lying before. After passing the Rivers Acheron and Phlegethon, I avoided Tartarus and its pit of embracing torment...”

It reminded me more of Homer than Hemingway, which was surprising in a war memoir. The author layers Greco-Roman myth over the immediacy of modern battle, like he can only process carnage by refracting it through an ancient lens. At first I thought this was overblown, maybe even self-indulgent. But as the book goes on, I realized the style is intentional. War, for him, is not just blood and bullets — it’s mythic fate pressing down on mortals. Whether or not that works for you as a reader probably depends on your tolerance for grandiose prose.

The book shifts gears sharply in tone, though. Later, Mace strips away the myth and delivers a blunt confession:

“I was a killer, a murderer with no emotion or qualm given at the act of a smashed face or a cut throat. Or rarely so. Not even a body blown to bits could elicit a quiver. Indeed, when very young, an aged bairn living on my own, and fleeing a dark childhood’s abusive existence, I was a killer. Perhaps, a middling sociopath, if such there is. Yet…, in the here and now, I was still tired of the mayhem and suffering, which was something that ere before, once caused me no reaction.”

This rawness is jarring but in a good way. I wasn’t sure if I should recoil or nod in grim understanding. Maybe it’s just me, but this section felt more honest than the mythic flourishes. It humanized him by admitting his inhumanity. That contradiction drives much of the memoir: a man shaped by brutality, but also weary of it.

Then there are the battlefield scenes, written with dense, almost gothic imagery. One example:

“In this Stygian dark of a rain soaked caliginous night, the Allies were still attempting to move northwest up the Italian peninsula from the south and at best, it was a slow moving inch by bloody exertion at every moment. Every crawling inch it seemed, created another mound of dead, a streamed river of vast flowing vital fluids. Theirs and ours.”

It’s not subtle but it’s undeniably vivid. You can smell the mud, see the rain, hear the groan of bodies in motion. Some readers might find the archaic diction (“caliginous”) heavy-handed, yet it does set this book apart. It doesn’t sound like every other war story.

On style, Mace is uneven but memorable. He blends myth, confession, and battlefield reportage in a way that sometimes stumbles but often soars. Character development is mostly internal — we see his contradictions, his fatigue, his attempts to reconcile survival with morality. There aren’t many fully fleshed supporting characters, though comrades and enemies appear in flashes. Story development can feel meandering; it’s more episodic than tightly plotted. Still, the emotional arc — from mythic bravado to weary self-reckoning — gives it a shape, however loose. Grammar here is a little bit complicated. The sentences are long, winding, sometimes grammatically wayward, but always charged with voice. They read like someone thinking on the page, not like someone polishing for an editor. That rawness makes the narrative more compelling, not less.

It is a compelling read, though not in a conventional sense. It doesn’t march forward like a clean history or a tidy memoir. It staggers, sways, circles back, digresses into mythology and memory. At times I was frustrated. At other times, I was floored which reminded me of reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night — exhausting, brutal, and yet strangely beautiful.

Would I recommend it? To a casual reader of World War II memoirs, maybe not; it’s too idiosyncratic, too messy. But to someone who wants a war book that bleeds myth and memory onto the page, that dares to be unpolished, I’d say yes. At the very least, you won’t mistake "A Coin For Charon: And My Journey to Find A Home" by W. Mace for anything else.

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