I’ve finally finished Robert Ferrigno’s, Prayers for the Assassin.

I’m not a literary critic. I’ve got a relatively decent vocabulary and I can write in a way that usually gets my point across. I read a LOT. I read popular fiction and science fiction and, to the surprise of one of the guys in my office with a big ol’ brain, I read non-fiction on occasion. So if you’re looking for a scholarly review of this book, move on. I’m just an ol’ fart AF MSgt who’s going to do a couple more years and then go teach high school back home.

Before I say anything else, I want to thank Robert Ferrigno for sending advanced copies of his book to bloggers and giving us the opportunity to comment on his work. First of all, I LOVE free books. More importantly, I love it when someone asks a shmoe like me what I think.

I’ve mentioned before that I liked this book more than I expected to. Yeah-yeah it’s like Fatherland and it’s like Fahrenheit 451. It’s a topical Twilight Zone episode on steroids. Yawn. And then it sucked me in. I blame Mr. Ferrigno for some lost hours of sleep over the past couple of weeks. As much as I wanted to turn in on time (for a change) I also wanted to read one more chapter. Toward the end I needed to finish it. I needed to see how it all turned out. It may be like the books already mentioned, but there are also elements of James Patterson, Tom Clancy, David Weber and Robert Heinlein. It goes beyond being derivative. He gives you anchors in pop fiction, past and present, but he also twists things just enough to skew what you think is going to come next. The people you expect to be the heroes, aren’t the heroes and the people you’d think were the bad guys, aren’t the bad guys.

What struck me from the get-go was that I was going to learn some things while I read this book. I wasn’t just going to be comfortable with the same archetypes that we often see over and over in popular fiction. Some of the characters are very familiar, others I’ve never seen before. I’ve not met them in books or movies or the news. These were the people that were going to teach me.

There are enough characters that we’ve seen before to give us an anchor. Catholic cops and good ol’ boys from down South. A stark raving fundamentalist Imam who will stop at nothing to push his form of Islam on the world. We know these people. Some better than others but we’ve got the picture.

What I expected was a story of Christians vs Muslims. Freedom loving “real” Americans against the evil invading Muslims who have taken over our country. This is not the story I got.

The folks who you’re going to have to wrap your brain around are the ones we simply don’t see enough of in our daily lives. Moderate Muslims. Modern Muslims. Muslims who long for the days when Islam not only meant religious piety and control, but it meant freedom of thought and ideas. When the culture and art and science of Muslims surpassed those of the rest of the world. You’re going to meet Muslims that, just like you and I, simply want to live their lives with their families and be left alone by the powers that be. Oddly enough, I’ve learned more about Islam through them than through any other media.

One character, Redbeard, is a former Catholic who converted to Islam because he was disgusted with the state of America before the change; Crime. God being driven out of our schools and out of public places. Drugs. The culture of anything goes, no one is responsible for anything, everything is relative. What happens when you take away all semblance of morality and order? You breed a generation longing for those things. You breed a generation that will take them where ever they can find them. What happened to Redbeard scared me. Take away casual references to God and give people the choice of fundamental religion as the only form of spirituality…this is bad thing.

This is a story of freedom vs fascism. Good vs evil. Truth vs the history as it was written by the victors. This is an American story in an America gone mad. This is an Islamic story in a Caliph formed on lies but redeemed by a longing for freedom. The cultures that are currently at war blend and become something better than the sum of their parts.

You may ask yourself how America could possibly be taken over by Islam. How the HELL could we allow it to happen? I don’t believe in spoilers, but I will say that there were some large events that pushed us into the arms of Allah, but what was more interesting were the smaller, more subtle events that led to America’s conversion. Those were the events that allowed me to believe what had happened in Ferrigno’s world. Those are the elements that gave me a chill down my spine.

The book was released back on 7 Feb according to Amazon. Go pick it up. It’s a good ride. It’s a lot of fun. I think it would make a great action movie with a set of morals we can all wrap our heads around.

Good interview with Hugh Hewitt and Robert Ferrigno.