Dusk Visitor

Thirty-six short stories by Musa Al-Halool, a writer born in Raqqa, Syria. His family home was seized by ISIS and later destroyed in coalition airstrikes. The stories grew out of his bitterness toward the Syrian regime and, as Syria has slid from a rigid, absurdly bureaucratic state into the chaos of war, they speak in a single unchanging voice amid the madness. Their world is Kafkaesque and Middle Eastern.

The book begins with eight political fables grouped under the heading Ratistan, or the Country of Rats. Some of these fables set out themes that the longer pieces later pick up and expand, while others offer a counterpoint to them.

The author also speaks to Western readers, drawing a parallel with Ernest Hemingway's warnings about fascism in 1920s Italy and the Spanish Civil War that led to the Second World War. He argues that dictatorships and security states in the Middle East grow where ordinary citizens, including many well-meaning ones, find it easier to cooperate than to resist. Western readers who pity such societies are invited to reconsider. He suggests that comic incompetence, torture and mass murder could arrive in the EU, the UK, the US and elsewhere through the normalization of lies and exaggeration, a weakened judiciary, rigged electoral districts, strongmen who want to rule for life, and legal threats against political opponents.