Anti Lebanon

It is Arab Spring and the fate of the Christians of the Middle East is uncertain. The many Christians of Lebanon are walking a knifeedge their very survival in their ancestral refuge in doubt as the Lebanese government becomes Hezbollahdominated while Syria convulses with warring religious factions. Anti Lebanon is a crossgenre political thriller and horror story embedded within these recent events featuring a multiethnic Christian family living out the lingering aftereffects 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 little war in Beirut when the Shi''a resistance/militia Hezbollah takes over most of the city. In this milieuthe emptied streets of Christian east Beirut the old shellscarred 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.