Bücher von Carl Shuker

It is Arab Spring and the fate of the Christians of the Middle East is uncertain. The many Christians of Lebanon are walking a knife-edge, their very survival in their ancestral refuge in doubt, as the Lebanese government becomes Hezbollah-dominated, while Syria convulses with warring religious factions. Anti Lebanon is a cross-genre political thriller and horror story embedded within these recent events, featuring a multiethnic Christian family living out the lingering after-effects of Lebanon's civil war as it struggles to deal with its phantoms, its ghosts, and its vampires.Leon Elias is a young and impoverished Lebanese man whose older sister had joined a Christian militia and has been killed. He becomes caught up in the recent "e;little war"e; in Beirut, when the Shia resistance/militia Hezbollah takes over most of the city. In this milieuthe emptied streets of Christian east Beirut, the old shell-scarred sandstone villas, the echoing gunfirehe becomes involved, only partly by choice, in the theft of a seriously valuable piece of artisanal jewelry, and is bittenlike a vampireby its Armenian maker.Events take a ghostly and mysterious turn as the factions jostling for power in Beirut begin to align against him and his family, and he is forced to flee the sullied beauty of that wonderful and pitiful country, in this story of love and loss, of the civil war and the Arabization of the Switzerland of the Middle East, and of contemporary vampiresbeings addicted to violence, lies, and baser primal drives.Carl Shuker is a remarkable writer. A storyteller in the tradition of Celine and J. G. Ballard, no one alive writes better sentences. Anti Lebanon will delight his fans and entrance anyone new to his fine work.

Carl Shuker's protagonist, Richard Sauer, heads off to college for no reason other than to escape the stultifying normalcy of his middle–class family in Timaru, New Zealand. He may appear ordinary in his aimlessness, mangling his way through his first year in college, but his bonging and banging, his anger and rage, take a brutal turn at an out–of–control dorm party which lands Richey in front of the disciplinary committee with a sexual harassment charge. Dropping out of school before he's thrown out, Richey and his housemates Matt, Nick, and Ursula begin a freefall that forces Richey to face his most destructive desires.Sex, violence, mutilation, and drugs fuel the despair and alienation of these disaffected youth — those once innocent but now struggle to find the right combination of alcohol and drugs to keep an all–night buzz. Like a punch in the stomach or a sustained cry, Carl Shuker's risky and harrowing first person narrative is as visceral as Fight Club and as brutal as A Clockwork Orange. On the surface Richey's actions are unforgivable, but his unformed and distorted world is immediate and recognizable to a generation brought up in a society indifferent to its own nihilism.