I have enjoyed reading Kurt Schlichter’s Kelly Turnbull novels of an America divided between red and blue. Despite certain flaws, Kelly is something of a Gary Stu, and the effects of a national split would be far worse than Schlichter imagines; the series is fun to read, leavened with Schlichter’s humor. I might complain the liberal villains are too cartoonishly over the top. Still, as Libs of TikTok has demonstrated, leftists are determined to be as cartoonishly over the top as possible. If anything, Schlichter has difficulty keeping up with leftist insanity.
The Attack is not like Kurt Schlichter’s other fiction. There is little of Schlichter’s humor to be seen. There are no steely heroes who enjoy blowing away the bad guys. There are no insane leftists who use weird new pronouns. There are only ordinary American men and women trying to prevail in the worst terrorist acts in American history.
The Attack was inspired by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Kurt Schlichter decided to write a book about the possibility of such a terrorist attack on the United States. Schlichter originally intended to write a nonfiction book but was persuaded that a novel would be more engaging to the reader. The trouble with attempting a novel depicting a massive terrorist assault on the United States is that writing on such a scale would require a book the size of a sweeping Tolstoyan epic with a cast of thousands of characters to do the subject justice. Such an epic could not be written quickly. It would, perhaps, take years. By that time, the attack Schlichter’s book is intended to alert us about could have become real.
Instead, Schlichter chose to create a fictitious oral history, rather like World War Z. This proved to be the correct choice. It is the only way to properly explore the many ways in which America is dangerously vulnerable to an atrocity similar to that experienced by Israel. In the Attack, Schlichter describes a three-day assault by ten thousand Islamic terrorists who have crossed our southern border aided by Mexican drug cartels. After weeks or months of preparing, the terrorist cells are activated and attack their targets, assisted by leftist “revolutionaries”, mostly college students. On the first day they attack public spaces, the obvious terrorist targets. The second day, the terrorists move to residential areas to kill and rape as many civilians as possible. Schools are a particular target on this second day of terror. On the third and final day of horror, infrastructure is the target, along with devastating cyberattacks that bring down the internet. The result is a shattered country with hundreds of thousands dead and many millions affected.
In The Attack, we experience the full horror of a series of terrorist attacks on America as witnessed by a whole gamut of characters. We read the stories of first responders on the scenes of multiple attacks, the victims and survivors of those attacks, and a confession by a captured terrorist before he is executed. We hear the stories of those whose job it was to anticipate an attack, who tell why the system failed. We read in raw detail what rescuers found when they arrived too late and the testimony of a little girl whose parents were murdered in front of her after she was raped.
The Attack is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is one of the scariest books I have ever read, the more so because it could become a true story. Millions of people would love to bring the Great Satan down and would be perfectly willing to sacrifice their own lives for a chance of martyrdom. Our southern border under the Biden administration is essentially nonexistent. It would be all too easy to smuggle in an army of thousands, a few at a time.
Yet, The Attack is essentially optimistic. America is attacked but not defeated. America is devastated but not broken. In the moment of crisis, Americans fight back and prevail against the terrorists despite a lack of leadership from Washington. America emerges from the Attack stronger and more determined. Perhaps this is the true lesson of The Attack, America is better than either its leaders or its enemies believe it to be. We can only hope we don’t need to prove our goodness in such a way as Kurt Schlichter writes.
Read this book, and pray it remains fiction.
David's Commonplace Book 