Having been raised, as a young man, on the magnificent novels of Allen Drury, I've been reading political fiction for a very long time. As "the drumbeat of history has quickened," political novels have become more sensationalistic and substantive, but this is a trap into which Kurt Schlichter has not fallen: his work has been less speculative than predictive. He's very good.

But "The Attack" is a whole different breed of cat, and a book that chills the blood. Whereas his other novels have posited what might happen in a few years, "The Attack" explains, in soul-crushing detail, what is happening today, and will almost inevitably happen tomorrow. Or, for that matter, later on today. Reading the headlines, observing the savagery and pure evil that has beset this world in the past few months, "The Attack" might easily be the heartbroken recollections of our neighbors or ourselves in a little while.

A departure for Schlichter, "The Attack"is not written in a narrative style. It comes closer to an epistolary novel, but it is actually the collected stories of a wide variety of average Americans after a monstrous attack on the American heartland, not with missiles or bombs, but with thousands of individual terrorists creating random, unspeakably vile attacks in every state in the nation. Recall what happened in Israel on October 7 2023, and you will have an idea of what "The Attack" describes happening in America.

"The Attack" is not for the squeamish, and will evoke both outrage, nausea, and tears from the reader. But the book is indispensable, because, God forbid, it is all too likely to a vision of tomorrow's headlines. ( )