Hank Williams Jr. once speculated in song about how the country might be different “if the South woulda won.” The pot-boiling novelist Robert Ferrigno does him one better in Prayers for the Assassin: What if the Middle East woulda won? Williams’s victorious South “wouldn’t have no killers gettin’ off free,” but in Mr. Ferrigno’s Islamic Republic of America the imams are a damn sight stricter than that. Not only does the Super Bowl have male cheerleaders; it breaks at halftime for prayers.
If this sounds like sensationalist fantasy, well, it is. The America that Mr. Ferrigno envisions, while faux-frightening, is hard to take seriously. Las Vegas, in the Nevada Free State, acts as a kind of go-between for the Islamic Republic (most of the current-day U.S.) and the Bible Belt, a Christian holdout made up of large parts of the old Confederacy. There is an underground railroad to Canada, along which oppressed Islamic Republic citizens (not least homosexuals) seek nontheocratic freedom up north. New York and Washington are radioactive wastelands, the victims of a suitcase nuke attack that help to hurry along the American changeover.
Which raises the question: Could it happen? Could the fate of the U.S. come to rest in the hands of people like Mr. Ferrigno’s antiheroes—a rogue operative named Rakkim and a “moderate” Muslim named Sarah? Mr. Ferrigno, with appropriate gallows humor, informs us that the Islamofascist conquest of our country wasn’t all a matter of terrorist intimidation. Pop culture played a part: Sarah cites “a country music star”—no, not Hank Williams Jr.—“praising Allah at the Grande Ole Opry . . . for starting a cascade effect that had led to millions of new converts.”
Given that pop culture these days has more time for worrying about McCarthyism and Big Pharma than militant Islam, Mr. Ferrigno deserves praise for the bravado of his conceit. If cartoons can get you killed, then maybe it’s an act of courage to write Prayers for the Assassin, whatever its limited literary merits. What do we stand to lose? That’s Mr. Ferrigno’s question—and he is miles ahead of countless more respectable scribblers.