Review of “2024 Attack on America” by Sasha Zarustin

Score: 88/100 (8.8 out of 10)

What happens when cutting-edge military technology goes rogue?

How would America respond to a full-blown cyberattack?

Can the fate of national security be entrusted to a embittered, disillusioned middle-aged U.S. veteran whose marriage and domestic life are collapsing all around him?

2024 Attack on America by Sasha Zarustin follows Gabriel Brinkerhoff, a man who proudly enlisted in the U.S. military following the 9/11 terrorist attacks for the explicit purpose of defending the nation he loved. His patriotism, commitment, devotion, and love of country are attributes that we respect and admire. Unfortunately, they are challenged by deeper, darker secrets that he gradually uncovers including his friend's involvement in the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, which includes the torture of suspected and alleged terrorists.

Through this book, the author seems to want to shed light on the duality of human nature and the potential for human beings (including their governments, militaries, and intelligence agencies) to do both good and evil. In fact, the two American flags at the top of the cover are shown in darkness and light, reaffirming that.

Just as America is shown in the book to have a disturbing dual nature (both protecting the world from terrorism and evildoers while brutally addressing them through violence), so too do Gabriel, Mary, and Dexter harbor deep, dark secrets of their own. Like America, they hide and suppress these things to save face and maintain some sense of harmony and stability.

Evil is all around. Who can you truly trust? Who is truly right or truly wrong?
The world is full of gray.

So, while understand all of that and appreciate aspects of this book, we're also having a bit of difficulty reviewing it. The reason for that is simply because it's not what one would typically expect from any of the genres implied by the book's title, description, or cover design.

Where do we even begin with that?

The title, description, and cover design would all imply that this is a thriller of some sort (perhaps a cyber/military/espionage/political thriller). To a certain extent, it is (on all counts). However, to what extent? How much is this a political thriller? How much is this a cyber thriller?

You can't put 25 grams of sugar in a Diet Coke and still call it a "Diet Coke."
You can't make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, put "BLT" on the sandwich bag and say that makes it a "BLT sandwich."  There are expectations for what a person buys/orders. 

How does this book start off with such an intense opening (reminding us of the peak of the Cuban missile crisis or an attack by Skynet from Terminator) only to become so muddled and meandering?

The problem is that it goes too far off the rails, becoming distracted with more frivolous things, particularly Gabriel's personal domestic problems and sexual escapades. It loses focus and, as a consequence, could risk losing its grip on the target audience.

The target audience came here for bombs, missiles, explosions, guns, tanks, drones, espionage and counter-espionage, cool gadgets like the ones you'd see in Bond films, hackers and counter-hackers, etc. They came here for discussions of international tensions and a mad scramble for technological superiority in regard to things like A.I. Yes, some of that may be in this book, but it's pushed so far into the backdrop that it's easy to forget that it's even relevant to the plot.

The target audience probably didn't come here to read about a guy and his relationship problems, his kinks, and his “Vitamin V” (Viagra) dependence. They probably didn't come here to read about a guy carrying a cancerous, toxic friend with him for 20+ years, being progressively corrupted by him through gambling, drinking, and hooking up with prostitutes.

By the way, Dexter is a lot like Gavin/Frederick Chance from Interview with Death by V.K. Pasanen. They're almost the same character (or archetype).

All of that just seems so unnecessary, superfluous, and distracting. We kept wondering: Can we please get back to the plot? Can we please get to intercepting these drones? Stopping the cyberattacks? Solving the actual problem that's affecting millions of Americans?

Let's get to the action! Let's get to a guy desperately running to save the White House (as portrayed on the cover). Let's get to this super-smart, super-techy guy getting on his rigged-up quantum supercomputer to break the new enigma code and prevent the world from going nuclear. Let's get to these missiles raining down from the sky and a countdown timer giving us an idea of how much time we have to break the code before extinction.

In reading this book, it just always seemed like the author was sandbagging, dragging their feet, and couldn't decide on what genre they wanted to write in or what they actually wanted to focus on.

You can definitely have a romantic (or even erotic) side-plot in a sci-fi or thriller novel. Alexandru Czimbor did it in the last contest with Sentience Hazard, a book that featured a very disturbed scientist who created an A.I. and android in the likeness of the woman who broke his heart with the aim of showing her up. That book won the whole contest! Why? Because the characters were excellent and it perfectly balanced that intimate content with a very interesting, well-developed conflict involving a cyber arms race between the U.S. and China.

Sentience Hazard and 2024 Attack on America have A LOT in common.
The issue we had with 2024 Attack on America was that it was overly fixated on Gabriel's personal problems. These problems ceased being interesting and started to detract from the flow and pacing of the story, making it seem sluggish, fluffy, and bogged down.

Imagine playing something like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas... you've got your light machine-gun, grenades, and ballistic armor ready. You're chomping at the bit to go shoot/blow up some terrorists and stop these thugs from detonating a WMD in the heart of Sin City, but then your main character begins an hours-long series of side-quests to learn how prostitution works, then you sit through cut-scene after cut-scene of the main character sleeping with his wife (or trying to) and then some hookers. You might start to wonder: did I purchase an M-rated action-thriller game or a sex game from an X-rated site? They're not the same thing. And they usually don't mix well.

And then you get flashbacks. Cut-scene after cut-scene of flashbacks to how royally your character's best friend, Dexter, tried to screw him up in the past.

And then you realize that your character's best friend, Dexter, is a sadistic torturer for the CIA after cheating his way there.

Ok... but what about stopping the cyberattacks? What about saving America? What about stopping these terrorists? What about getting to the bottom of who's behind them?

What about Demiurge/Agent D? You know, the A.I./quantum supercomputer from the subtitle?
Yes, it's in here, but we had to wait 'til like 220+ pages in for this thing to show up when it's literally the namesake of the book.

These things should be at the forefront of our minds, not in the back.

Yes, you could argue that Demiurge's “stress-test” form a frame around the core story like Robert Walton in Frankenstein, but the audience isn't aware of that for most of the book and will likely become more distracted and entangled with the character's frivolous personal issues (as described earlier).

So much of this book is about Mary and Dexter, and we really wish it wasn't.

Why introduce us to all of these military people in the beginning then not mention them for most of the book? We're told their names, ranks, and titles, yet they don't seem relevant at all.

Colonel Bennett, General Anderson, Lieutenant Michael Johnson, Commander Akira Sato, and Sergeant Ray Kim aren't even in the rest of the book from what we remember, so why introduce them and name them all as if they would be?

For comparison's sake, Gabriel's old Latina crush, Sophia, gets more character development and page time than any of the aforementioned military characters combined.

Even Paula and Molly get discussed more than any of those military officers.

Why not introduce us to Mary and/or Dexter in a dramatic way since over half of this book seems to be about them?

And why is more than half this book about these two side characters?

Shouldn't it be about the cyberterrorists and the cyberterrorism? Cybercrimes? The super-dangerous super A.I.? Preventing a national cyber catastrophe? You know... the cyber-thriller-stuff most people would have purchased the book to read about?

The closest we get to the cyber-stuff being tied into Gabriel's personal issues is when he uses the cyber-stuff to discover his wife's dark secret.

And you could maybe argue that Demiurge is able to play on Gabriel's insecurities and his own guilt over misusing technology for his own gain (spying on Mary). Other than that, they seem like two completely separate, unrelated, disconnected plots that probably belong in two completely separate books in two completely separate genres.

In other words, this reads like two completely different novels that somehow got written together.

Yes, there's cognitive dissonance, then there's something like this that goes beyond defying expectations and starts to feel like your expectations are being outright betrayed.

Imagine being promised that Rocky would fight Ivan Drago by the end of Rocky IV, then a grand majority of it is dedicated to Rocky sleeping around and having relationship issues with Adrian, then the movie concludes with a press conference in which Rocky decides to put off the fight 'til he handles his divorce and can get partial custody of Rocky Junior. That's kinda how it felt.

We have a guess as to the root of the issues: it's sequel syndrome. The author seemed to have been building to or planning to release a series of sequels, probably a lot of them. So, the author may have used this first book as an opportunity to very slowly, methodically, and painstakingly develop the main characters en route to building to an eventual conflict which would be explored in later books.

Whether that's true or not is up in the air, but it certainly feels that way.

But think about this: in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star in the first movie. We knew the Empire was evil. We knew about Darth Vader.

In the first Terminator, Sarah Connor crushed the T-800 in a hydraulic press. We knew that Skynet was evil. We knew that there could be more of these Terminators that could threaten the characters someday. We knew that humanity was in dire straights.

Compare that to the long, agonizing setup and conclusion in this book. It just doesn't hit nearly the same. It doesn't seem triumphant, surprising, or satisfying at all. Gabriel didn't blow up the Death Star or crush a Terminator. He basically just decided to get off his @$$ and do the thing he should've been doing the whole book.

It shouldn't take 400+ pages for a protagonist to commit to doing the common sense thing—the only thing that would logically make sense for his character considering that the survival of himself, his family, and his country depend on it. We don't need people sitting around a table debating what to do next so late in the book.

Even when National Security is clearly on the line, Gabriel is casually listening to the radio thinking about his issues with Mary as a special song plays. Yes, we get that the A.I. is helping Gabriel to manipulate his wife, but how does that make Gabriel look any better as a character so late in his character arc? Did he go through that whole arc just to not arc--not change at all? And what about the actual military threat posed by the A.I.--the reason we all tuned in? Attaway to kill the tension of the world-altering implications of the over-arching A.I. plot.

This is supposed to be a thriller.

Thrillers are supposed to be exciting. There’s supposed to be action. Guns. Explosions. Espionage and counter-espionage. Terror and counter-terror. However, those things were far and inbetween, if not absent entirely. This reads more like an erotic family drama of some sort than a thriller or action novel.

We need action. We need people running, sprinting, desperately trying to prevent disaster and to save lives. We need heroes sweating, battered, beaten, bloodied, scratched, and bruised by the end of this. Think about Bruce Willis walking through glass in Die Hard.

Heck, think about Tanto from You Will Know Vengeance by W.A. Pepper, who was also a super-smart, talented, morally-dubious hacker/coder guy like Gabriel. By the end of the book, Tanto was beaten to within an inch of his life. His limbs were broken and he could barely walk or run as he was being pursued by authorities, an evil secret organization, and the criminals he screwed over in prison.

By comparison, Gabriel's arc seems oddly... relaxed. He's not the guy flying those jets trying to intercept those drones. He's just the guy letting the people in power know that sh** is hitting the fan when they should already know that sh**t is hitting the fan. Thank you, Captain Obvious. You're promoted now. Welcome to the White House.

Gabriel's main issue is really resolving his failing relationships with his wife and son, an arc we've seen in fiction numerous times before to the point at which it has become cliche.

We just read the same character arc in Tough Road Home by Marie Watts and What Lies Buried by Leslie Kain—a husband who drove his wife and kid away now has to regain their love and trust while coming to terms with his choices.

It always seems like the plot is biding its time, sandbagging, and holding back on us. It can't just GO.

But let's spin this in the most positive light we can muster:

Put your expectations aside. 2024 Attack on America is an ambitious, multifaceted, variety novel that, like Sentience Hazard by Alexandru Czimbor, follows a morally gray yet ultimately well-meaning intellectual who is compelled to do the right thing in the midst of a bigger conflict. Gabriel uses his intelligence, experience, and unique gift to get to the bottom of a series of cyberattacks that are increasing in frequency and severity. Along the way, he battles his fierce inner-demons and personal struggles.

This is a book that explores the dual-natures of both human beings and their nations—the ability to do both profound good and great evil. This is a book that explores the concept of enemies on the outside and within.

Check it out on Amazon!