The Infernal: A Novel
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 1555977014 / Publisher: Graywolf Press, February 2015
When a badly burned boy is discovered in the desert, an interrogator works to extract his confession through torture, but what the interrogator extracts instead are the channeled voices of the players in the War on Terror.
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A fierce, searing response to the chaos of the war on terror—an utterly original and blackly comic debutIn the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal.
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