Red Moon

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Just beautiful writing! While very transparently a metaphor��"for Muslims and the fear of Islamic terrorism, and racial segregation, and the sort of discrimination that those with AIDS have to deal with, for almost any sort of hot-button discrimination/segregation topic of which you can think��"the lycans in this book are also a very distinct people, once segregated (as people of color once were) but now integrated��"as long as certain conditions are met. Being drugged. Not transforming. Reporting their existence and being on a database... You see the idea forming. As one of the characters discovers, “Plagues don't just kill people��"and that's what lobos is, a plague��"they kill humanity.” In the end, that is mostly what this book is about. It is about how hatred causes people to split when they should work together, it is about how people let their fear take over rather than truly seeking a solution, rather than realizing that people are people and need to be taken at individual, face value.

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In Benjamin Percy's Red Moon, the world is very similar to ours except for one key difference. The national threat is not terrorists from the Middle East but rather something a bit closer to home. Lycans, or werewolves, have long been protesting their treatment at the hands of the government, and their more radical elements are done with polite protesting. A plane attack is just their first plan. The ultimate solution is so much worse. With anti-lycan sentiment at an all-time high, those infected with the disease find themselves facing all new threats. Mr. Percy's world-building is a creative masterpiece. By substituting the lycans for every other real-world, modern-day national threat, he establishes a world that is surprisingly realistic. He also minimizes the fantasy element by building a world in which the major, historically relevant, and well-known revolts and protests still happened but with different culprits. It is a brilliant piece of alternative history that does much to lend credence to the entire story. The story itself is a fast-paced, no-holds-barred thriller. The action is at times brutal, but Mr. Percy never crosses over into the macabre or uses gore for sensationalism. Every act of torture or scene of violence serves a purpose, one that creates the emotional connection necessary to understand the characters and their motivations. He also uses such scenes to highlight the huge swath of gray that covers such polarizing ideologies. For, a reader will find it difficult to unanimously side with either one character or faction. Mr. Percy balances a reader's sympathy between the two, further complicating the decisiveness of the escalating conflict. A clever premise complete with thrilling action makes Red Moon one of the more exciting novels to be released this spring. Its revisionist history may alter familiar terrorist attacks but provides an excellent analogy for our current "war against terror" and our continued presence in Afghanistan. The characters are wonderfully complex and very real, but it is Mr. Percy's beautiful writing that steals the show. His stark words paint a clear and realistic picture of this multi-layered, highly symbolic story about intolerance and the depths to which people will go in order to protect their rights. One should not be turned off by the fact that Red Moon just so happens to be about werewolves because the message is one for the ages.