Siren Song

Obviously, the current War on Terror has been of major concern for all of us for some time now, sixteen years and counting. In particular, apart from the immediate dangers to life and limb that it directly poses, I have been puzzled by the drive towards executing such nihilistic zealotry in our era. I wanted to try and understand it, as best anyone might be able to, that is. So, I researched the issue as thoroughly as I could, and came to realize that the drive to terror is a multi-faceted phenomenon, complex and beyond easy and lazy explanations that reduce it to nothing more than outright evil. It certainly is the latter, but there's so much more.

It's this complexity, and perhaps ultimately terrorism's unfathomableness, that I try to explore in "Siren Song." That's why I recruited so many main protagonists to my cause; potential terrorists come from many walks of life, and I wanted to show them as living, thinking, and emotional creatures, as well as victims themselves, in a way, of the truly senseless War on Terror. Beyond laying out this "socio-psychological" analysis in literary form, I also wanted, as in all my other novels, to hopefully leave the reader in something of a different conscious state than they were before they read the novel. This a lofty goal, to have one's literature change people's consciousnesses in this way, but for me such an outcome is the true mark of literature, that it's more than just a "ripping yarn," a passing moment of mild entertainment.