Dusk Visitor is a warning from the Middle East: We are Next. The Dusk Visitor is one of the few works of literature by a Syrian on the subject of the Syrian Civil War, the Assad government, and the authoritarian style of other Arab dictators. Musa Al-Halool is from Raqqa, Syria, with one home in town and a larger family home in a village nearby. He came to the US in 1989 on a Fulbright, took his MA and PhD from Penn State, and has taught American literature in the Arab world for many years.

Raqqa was captured by the opposition in 2013 and became the capitol of ISIS the year after and the author begins with an introduction that details his losses, as a Syrian from Raqqa, to ISIS occupiers and US bombing. The heart of The Dusk Visitor is short fiction that paints a dystopian landscape, Kafkaesque, life that appears to offer hope and yet is riven with absurdity, unfreedom, fear, and death.

The author reveals his intentions when he titles one section "Che Ti Dice La Patria" a chant used by Italian Fascists in the 1920s and that Hemingway chose for the title of his 1927 short story. The author is well aware that Hemingway warned the world of the rise of Fascism and World War Two in his reports from Italy in the 1920s and from Spain at the time of Guernica. Now, Musa Al-Halool tips us off, in this one phrase. The dystopian world he describes in the Middle East is what awaits the US and Europe. Our current resurgence of undemocratic sentiment, sleeper cells, and militias mirrors what Hemingway was seeing in Europe.

The collection of stories harkens back to such classic authors like Franz Kafka, George Orwell, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury and Anthony Burgess.