TWILIGHT

A UN team charged with documenting war crimes dodges warring local militias—and every bullet is fired in upstate New York in DuBois’s riveting day-after-tomorrow thriller.

“Red rules!” is the battle cry in the countryside around Albany in the days after a suitcase nuke is detonated in lower Manhattan. Seeing a country driven to its knees by terrorist attacks, deprived of two centuries of civilized comforts and divided by civil war, the UN dispatches squads to keep the fragile armistice among battling factions and arrest the perpetrators of war crimes and document atrocities. Samuel Simpson has left his job as a features writer at the Toronto Star to serve with half a dozen comrades from around the world whose mission is to find Site A, the mass graveyard where a militia buried hundreds of civilians they massacred. DuBois does such a razor-sharp job of detailing the surreal perils of the war-torn American landscape that the plot—Samuel's suspicions that one of his mates may be a traitor, his separation from the rest of them and his adventures on his own, and even the quest for Site A before an impending renegotiation of the armistice offers amnesty to the zealots responsible for the slaughter—inevitably comes off as a series of anticlimaxes.

The nightmarish can’t-happen-here premise perfectly suits DuBois’s dark imagination (Primary Storm, 2006, etc.). Don’t hold your breath waiting for the movie.