Ed. Note: This is the third of three excerpts. Chapters one and two can be found here. ”The Final Hour” is available at Amazon.

Chapter Five

The White Room

I looked around.  There wasn’t much to see.  It was a small, cramped, white room.  There were no windows, no two-way mirrors, just the rough painted surface of the blank white cinderblock walls.  There was a white table bolted to the floor, and two plastic white chairs, one on either side.

For a minute or two, I just stood there, staring stupidly at all that whiteness.  I was still a little messed up in my head.  The memories from my attack still clung to me.  The scene had been so real, it was so much as if I were there, right there.  It hurt to be back here again, back in this prison.  Anyplace would have been better.

I heard the lock on the white door snap again.  The door opened.

I turned and saw Detective Rose step into the room.

Man, I can’t tell you what that was like.  At the sight of him, I felt my sore, battered body go weak with relief.  I couldn’t remember the last time I was so happy to see anyone.

“Rose!” I blurted out.  “Dude!  Oh, man, it’s about time you showed up!”

Rose didn’t answer.  His face was blank, expressionless. But then he never was much in the expressing-himself department.  He was a black guy with a round face and flat features, a thin moustache and smart, steady eyes.  He rarely smiled.  He rarely even grimaced.  Even his suits seemed to have no particular color.  He was always all business.

I saw his eyes go over me, pausing on the cuts and bruises.  But all he said was, “Sit down, Charlie.”

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Ed. Note: This is the second of three excerpts. Part one is here. Part three posts tomorrow. ”The Final Hour” is available at Amazon.

Chapter Two

The Yard King 

What just happened?

In the terror of the moment, I couldn’t make sense of it.  Then I could.

One of the Nazi musclemen—one of the thugs who’d been with me by the free weights—was standing before me where the wolf-faced man had been.  His fist was raised, a stone was gripped in it.  He had stepped up behind the Islamist assassin and clubbed him in the back of the neck.

The next instant, the two men holding me were ripped away, as if they’d been caught up in a tornado or something.  Some Swastika-tatooed musclemen had grabbed them too, dragged them off me.  As the men fought back, more of the Islamists were running to the scene to join the fight and more of the Nazis too.  Another second and hate-filled men were battling other hate-filled men back and forth across the grass. There was the crack of fists on bone.  Blood flying through the air.  Grunted curses and ugly names.  Men down on the ground rolling over and over one another, trying to gouge one another’s eyes or clutch one another’s throats.

It all happened in a second.  I stood dazed at the center of the chaos.

I thought:  This is hell.  It must look just like this in hell.

Now the guards in their blue shirts seemed suddenly to reappear out of nowhere.  They rushed into the melee of gray uniforms, wrapping arms around prisoners’ throats to pull them apart, hammering at their heads with the edges of their walkie-talkies, kicking at them as they rolled around in the dirt and on the asphalt.

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Ed. Note: This is the first of three excerpts that will post over next three days. ”The Final Hour” is available at Amazon.

The Homelanders series is about a kid named Charlie West – a good kid, who goes to sleep in his own bed one night and wakes up strapped to a chair being tortured by Islamo-fascist terrorists.  He manages to make a run for it – only to find that he’s also wanted by the police for murder.  For the first three novels in the series, he’s been on the run from both the jihadis and the cops, trying to find out what happened to his life before someone kills him or puts him behind bars.

The Final Hour  is the fourth and last installment in the series.  As it begins, Charlie has got most of the answers he needs, but the police have got him.  He’s been thrown into a very tough prison called Abingdon, where it’s a toss-up whether Islamist thugs or Nazis are going to have the pleasure of killing him first…

 Chapter One

Abingdon 

Most people have to die to get to hell.  I took a shortcut.

I was in Abingdon State Prison.  Locked away for a murder I didn’t commit.  Waiting for the men who were coming to kill me.  With nowhere to run.

It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I’d been there for two weeks.  Two weeks of smothering boredom and strangling fear.  When I was locked in my cell, the minutes seemed to lie like dead men, to decay like dead men—so slowly you could barely tell it was happening.  When I was out in the exercise yard or in the cafeteria or in the showers, there was just the fear, the waiting.  Waiting for the killers to make good their threat, the words one of them had whispered in my ear as I stood in the dinner line one night:

You’re already dead, West.  You just don’t know it yet.

Alone in my cell, I stared at the tan wall.  I felt a black despair surrounding me, closing in on me.  I did everything I could to fight it.  I did push-ups.  I read my Bible.  I prayed.  The prayer gave me some comfort, some relief.

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This is a speech Andrew Klavan gave on Conservatism in American Fiction at the Horowitz Freedom Center Retreat. It’s forty-minutes and well worth your time, especially to anyone thinking of diving into the world of fictional storytelling. The lessons here apply to filmmakers as much as novelists and while many topics are covered, the overall theme looks at the Big Picture ideas every storyteller can learn from:

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Klavan speaks at length about the importance of American ideas in great storytelling, the history of Western ideas and values in literature, the new blacklist, the brilliance of David Mamet as both a writer and thinker, the leftist marginalizing of Saul Bellow for political reasons, and the recent censoring of “Huckleberry Finn.”

Brilliant, fascinating, insightful  stuff — especially the segments on “Finn,”  how post-modern theory threatens intelligent storytelling, and how conservative voices are now being heard in the “great conversation” between Right and Left in the uniquely American search for truth.

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Good interview that touches on a number of subjects. And much of it explains why Hollywood currently has an approval rating of 33% — which is a disaster for any industry interested in selling a product to the public.

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Now that we have your attention.

Andrew Klavan’s written a terrific piece for City Journal looking at Katherine Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” which tanked at the box office, is a frontrunner to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar and has generated debate among conservatives over whether the dynamic action-director’s visceral look at a U.S. Army Bomb Squad is just another Iraq War film or something a little more worthy.

It’s a good debate… Be sure to read the whole thing and then feel free to have at it in the comments…

City Journal:

[I]s The Hurt Locker yet another piece of idiot agit-prop that makes our soldiers’ jobs harder and our enemies’ lives easier? The filmmakers and the media are desperate to convince us otherwise. For weeks before Hurt Locker’s release, they loudly reassured the public that the movie was, in the words of Roger Ebert, “completely apolitical. It has no opinion on the war in Iraq, except that there is one.” Some conservative reviewers agreed. Mark Hemingway at National Review wrote that the film “is not a straight depiction of American heroism; but it is a revelatory examination of the experiences and motivations of U.S. soldiers.”

But John Nolte, the voice of reason who runs Andrew Breitbart’s indispensable Big Hollywood website, would have none of it. He condemned the film. (more…)