"Dies Irae" and "The Attack"

A literature of unthinkable and unspeakable American terror

I’m a prepper, and since Bill Forstchen’s novel, One Second After was the proximate inspiration for my own Lightning Fall, a much longer and broader treatment of the same general theme - a devastating EMP attack on CONUS - which in turn became an Amazon best seller, I naturally purchased Bill’s novella, Dies Irae - Day of Wrath as soon as it was released.

While a much more focused tale painted on a smaller canvas than One Second After, which has gone on to spawn four more sequel novels, Day of Wrath perhaps packs an even stronger visceral punch by virtue of delivering its payload right to the gut rather than diffusing it with a host of other characters, scenarios, and complications. It is what it is - the story of an everyman school teacher whose middle school - which his daughter attends - is attacked by a squad of Muslim terrorists bent on killing as many kids as they can.

It turns out that the handful of Muslims Forstchen’s hero must deal with in order to save himself and his daughter is just one tiny unit of dozens sent to attack the United States in a coordinated assault designed to break the will of the American people and convince them of the futility of opposing the inevitable triumph of fundamentalist Islam over the fading West.

Kurt Schlichter’s tale, on the other hand, approaches the same issue from the other side - a vast and sweeping panorama of deliberate terror, horror, and violence wreaked on the U.S. by thousands of Muslim jihadis attacking over a three day period in a highly sophisticated and coordinated operation aimed at exploiting the weakest underpinnings and most naked vulnerabilities of American society. He tells his tale by giving everybody a chance to speak for themselves in hundreds of vignettes covering every aspect of the attack, from the planning and execution of it by Iranian leaders, to the absolute certainty of the Holy Warriors who carry it out, to the shock and horror of the victims, the treachery of some Americans who support the Muslim terrorists, to the final inevitable outcome, in which the death of essentially all of the jihadis is achieved not least by Americans putting the half-billion firearms they keep and bear in their homes, their cars, and on their persons to effective use.

It should be noted that the millions of AR-15s owned by Americans plays a not insignificant role in this end game. Schlichter wrote his book in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, in which 6000 trained and dedicated fundamentalist Muslim murderers invaded Israel and successfully carried out an orgy of torture, rape, and murder on a (unlike America) mostly unarmed citizenry.

Though dealing with different aspects of similar events, or, rather, the same sort of event viewed through two different prisms, one should note that both are representative of what I call a “literature of American terror” that is materially different than the previous version, which involved military attacks on the US, usually nuclear, by foreigner enemies, usually communist. It seems that the national American nightmare shifts as new generations are faced with new existential threats on the ground. Fifty years ago the Soviet nuclear threat, in particular as expressed via the Cuban Missile Crisis that threatened to disrupt the liberal dreams of a Kennedy Camelot, produced efforts like The Day After, about which I’ve written elsewhere.

The Boomer Generation was haunted by the specter of nuclear annihilation, and with good reason. Coming of age only a short time after WWII killed hundreds of millions of people, in a world where two powers with gigantic nuclear arsenals faced off against each other in dozens of places all over the world, where 6 year old children learned to dive under their desks at school when atomic suns bloomed in their windows, and 17 year old boys prepared to be sent, often against their wills, to a bloody war half a world away, it should have been no surprise that they grew up with nightmares of commie bombs dancing in their night terrors.

Today’s generations didn’t grow up with that baggage. The fanged beasts in their mental jack-in-the-boxes were Muslim plane hijackers, Muslim invaders of Israel, Muslim dictators waging wars against each other and any other potential enemies, Muslims of various flavors killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslim terrorists destroying the Twin Towers in NYC and, most recently, the threat of individual assaults on Americans in which faceless but singular jihadis sawed off innocent heads with rusty knives while intoning sonorously about the greatness of Allah.

Then add to that the invasion of Israel, as depicted by the invaders broadcasting themselves committing their atrocities to the world thanks to the wonders of i-Phones and GoPros, and you won’t find the appearance of a new twist in the literature of American terror.

I am old enough to remember when horror stories were about vampires, werewolves, demons, and other such “nightmarish” things. Today, except for zombies - which are both highly popular and generally known to be unreal - none of those hold the power to terrify us.

And how could they, faced with the industrial atrocities inflicted on our collective psyche by the militarization and commodification of Islamic fundamentalist terror?