1st Books, 1999, $20, ISBN 1-58500-805-2, 368 pages

Now, how can you not crack open a book with McClellan, Lincoln, and Nixon on the cover? I did and found an "alternative history" that started out well, but devolved into some interdimensional mumbo-jumbo near the end where all versions of history collide like a bad espisode of Sliders or Seven Days.

In the beginning, we meet George McClellan and William T. Sherman speculating on the possibility of civil war breaking out. However, Lincoln breaks his neck in a fall off a horse and Hamlin takes over as president. As secession fever builds, Hamlin visits Charleston to work a deal with Jefferson Davis, with McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant in tow.

Fort Sumter is evacuated except for one old widowed sergeant and his daughter, Jeff Davis gets a political deal that will likely see him as President, and everyone goes home.

That's when the storyline turns to mush. Sherman goes nuts and McClellan soon falls into another dimension where the Civil War is happening and he's in the Peninsula and then at Antietam. A quick, if uninspiring overview of the various battles then sends us back into the Civil War dimension where Lincoln's remains, er, dead. Then it jumps around quite a bit with McClellan's ghost warning Lincoln about the assassination rigged by Stanton, whose own ghost then advises Nixon in 1959. Go figure.

Up until the time McClellan miraculously shares the same dimension as Sherman, Ghosts of Antietam was a pretty intriguing book. But after that, the prose meanders, the plot becomes hard to follow, and the end may be clear to the author, but not to me. This could have been an excellent alternative history book from the "Lincoln dies early" aspect. This could have been a good sci-fi book with the idea of alternate dimensions. But the schizophrenic pairing of ghosts leaves me uninspired.