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Calgarian's new novel, Our War, imagines an America where 'the cold cultural war went hot'

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Craig DiLouie feels like he is living in one of his novels.

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Not the one he is currently promoting, the undeniably timely, alternate-history thriller Our War.

No, the Calgary-based writer is thinking about The Thin White Line, a book he self-published in 2008. It imagined the frightening but clearly reality-based prospect of a novel influenza-type pandemic appearing in Canada.

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“I based in on Canada’s pandemic response plan and models for how many people would be affected over a period of time with or without interventions,” says DiLouie, in an interview from his Calgary office where he is self-isolating like the rest of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Did it have a happy ending?

Spoiler alert: “The intervention measures eventually worked and the disease petered out,” he says. “The world doesn’t end. If just feels like it does for a while.”

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DiLouie says the topic was something he was curious about more than a decade ago. So, using a creative equation that has served him well over the years, he combined his curiosity with a compelling ‘what-if?’ scenario and went from there.

This is also how he landed upon the equally prescient premise of Our War, even if reality hasn’t quite caught up with DiLouie’s imagination.

With all his books, the author tends to start with a big idea, which is usually precipitated by a big question. For Our War, the New Jersey-born writer imagined what would happen if the political polarization of his home country “continued to its logical extremes.”

“What if the cold cultural war between right and left went hot?” he asked.

The novel tells the story of a divided country descending into civil war after a Trump-like president is impeached. The Senate votes to remove him from office but he refused to leave. Heavily armed right-wing militias from rural areas start to take over government buildings and other areas, declaring the attempts to remove their beloved president as a soft coup by the “deep state.” Of course, this is only a few dangerous degrees away from what could have happened during the Trump impeachment.

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“Just like with Thin White Line, it really felt like I was starting to live one of my books,” he says. “The right-wing in the book call it a soft coup from the deep state. That’s exactly what right-wing militias called it in reality. They threatened civil war. Even Trump was intimating ‘Oh, you’re asking for civil war if I’m convicted.’ Right-wing militias were flexing their muscles. There was a lot of fear and talk about civil war at the time and it just sort of petered out once Trump was cleared by the Senate.”

But, in the book, the attempted removal of the president snowballs into a constitutional crisis and, eventually, civil war. The war is much closer to Bosnia than the historic north-and-south battles in the U.S., with conservative rural forces coming up against more progressive types in the bigger urban centres, says DiLouie.

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“You have these right-wing militias basically running around the countryside almost unimpeded, way too strong for local police departments,” he says. “But when they get to the city, they are up against very big police departments. So those cities fall under siege. So that’s where our story begins.”

Against this fiery backdrop, DiLouie tells a more intimate story of young siblings who are recruited by militias on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Hannah, 10, is recruited by the left-leaning Free Women militia in Indianapolis. Her older brother Alex, 15, is taken in by a right-wing “patriot” group. Both become child soldiers. In the book, a journalist uncovers the use of children and wants to expose both sides of the conflict.

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“I thought the use of child soldiers would be a fascinating way to reveal a war in the United States,” DiLouie says. “It’s not some big political thriller, it’s very personal. A lot of the story is through their eyes. They don’t give a crap about any of the politics. They don’t get it. They end up in these militias and they stay and end up fighting for them out of a sense for belonging and a sense of safety. Everything they know has been destroyed by these people and now they are dependent on them and they end up being indoctrinated and increasingly radicalized. It also shows the real victims of civil war. When there is a civil war, everybody fights and nobody wins and the biggest victims are going to the next generation.”

DiLouie says he also wanted to poke a hole in the idea of American exceptionalism, and specifically the idea that a civil war that includes child soldiers could never happen on U.S. soil.

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“There’s nothing special about the U.S. that this kind of thing couldn’t happen there,” he says. “It would look exactly like civil wars in other countries. There would be atrocities and brutalities and refugees and food shortages and electricity shortages and child soldiers.”

It’s not the first time DiLouie has written a big-themed book for adults that features young protagonists. A prolific writer who moved to Calgary in 2003, his output includes everything from a series of books about a Second World War Sherman tank crew to apocalyptic zombie novels. In his 2018 novel One of Us, the author imagined a world where a sexually transmitted bacterium produces a “plague generation” of children with severe deformities who prove to have special abilities as they grow older. It was a fable that explored dark issues of prejudice told from the point of view of children but certainly not meant for young readers. Still, DiLouie says telling stories through the eyes of young characters seems increasingly natural to him.

“I’m a father of two beautiful kids and they are my world,” he says. “I define myself as a father first and foremost before anything else right now. So when I look at what really scares me and what I’m mostly concerned about, it’s their welfare. So I’m continually looking at a world where I’m just alarmed by prejudice, as with One of Us, or political polarization and tribalization, as with Our War. It just makes me fearful for the kind of future of what my kids are going to have. So a lot of my writing is to explore and express those fears.”

Our War is now available.

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