Red Sky Mourning

This must be how straight men feel when they accidentally stumble into a gay bar: just a confusing sense of growing unease culminating in a realization of, "oh, I don't belong here and this isn't for me."

I'll admit up front that this was a blind airport purchase and I did not realize this was the seventh book in a series going into it. And it's not meant to be a standalone; there are tons of references to events and now-deceased characters from previous entries that I knew were going over my head. Throwaway lines like, "just like that time in Israel!" meant nothing to me because I just got here, but I'm sure all the callbacks landed for longtime fans.

The premise of a clandestine plan for China to make a move on invading Taiwan depending on the result of a 2024 U.S. Presidential election intrigued me, and the more I read the more I was almost having fun trying to figure out what was fiction and what wasn't. October 7th, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, COVID, Tiktok, and Elon Musk are directly referenced, but as far as I can tell the point of divergence with respect to the presidency was after Carter? I've never read a piece of contemporary fiction that skirted this close to real events.

Unfortunately this book suffered from the existence of a central protagonist that counteracted any enjoyment I could've experienced while reading it and I genuinely believe this would've been a more compelling narrative if he just wasn't in it. I came for the backroom politicking and international negotiations and double-crossing while rogue submarine commanders threaten to let the genie of nuclear war out of the bottle. Instead I got a comically unstoppable Mary Sue of a former SEAL with survivor's guilt who occasionally hallucinates his fridged wife and daughter (spoiler for previous books in this series I guess) encouraging him to keep killing and surviving.

To say nothing of the way the author can't go more than a few paragraphs without tripping over his dick to score some ham-fisted culture war dig. There are multiple references to how awful and dangerous big cities and San Francisco specifically have become, an extended circlejerk over how great Ayn Rand was, Wall Street executives who engage in ESG initiatives are literally called communists, and the Chinese antagonists (you know, the actual communists) point to DEI programs in the US military for the reason why the PLA will win any hypothetical future war. The way contemporary political issues are addressed in this book read like how someone on the far left would mock someone on the far right; I genuinely thought I was reading poorly-crafted parody at points.

There's clearly references to older and more famous military thrillers and espionage novels and I could tell the author had done a ton of meticulous research. I just wish I got more of the geopolitics the marketing blurb on the back cover promised and less hyper-masculine power fantasy.