Callisto-Torsten Krol

Callisto
Torsten Krol
Harper, Feb 2009, $14.99
ISBN: 9780061672941

Twenty-one year old Odell Deefus is enlisting in the army. However, the thirty years old car he drives to take him to the recruiting center from his home in Wyoming breaks down on a remote back road somewhere near Callisto, Kansas. The big dumb hick feels fortunate his heap expired by a home. He knocks and enters when no one responds. A few moments later Dean Lowry ask him what he is doing here. Dean does not get much friendlier implying Odell, with his black man’s name, is a fool to want to fight the Jihadists in Iraq.

However, Dean is not a Good Samaritan. He has studied Islam with a jihadist’s fundamentalist attitude, been involved with his Aunt Bree’s disappearance and is connected to a nasty sort named "Donnie Darko." When Odell accidentally kills Dean with a bat and finds Bree’s corpse in the freezer, he calls the police. The FBI conducts a massive search while also blowing away his claim that Dean with someone named Darko was plotting homeland terrorism; instead they assume he is the key member of a home grown terrorist cell and take him to the tropics for interrogation.

This is an engaging wild look at the Americanization of terrorism through the eyes of a naive “Yearling”. Odell, with his innocence and misunderstanding of subtly even those hammered into his face. He keeps the tale going as he is engulfed by cynics starting with Dean, Lowry’s sister and the Feds; even his worship from afar of Condoleezza Rice becomes tainted. Although the story line is action-packed and at times overwhelming, readers who appreciate a well written satirical thriller will appreciate Torsten Krol’s indictment of the unnecessary loss of innocence as a result not of 9/11 and the subsequent waste of global good will, but both caused by the American reaction to 9/11.

Harriet Klausner