Author(s): Carl Shuker

Novel

It is the Arab Spring and the fate of the Christians of the Middle East is uncertain. The many Christians of Lebanon are walking a knife-edge, their very survival in their ancestral refuge in doubt, as the Lebanese government becomes Hezbollah-dominated, while Syria convulses with warring religious factions. "Anti Lebanon" is a cross-genre political thriller and horror story embedded within these recent events, featuring a multiethnic Christian family living out the lingering after-effects of Lebanon's civil war as it struggles to deal with its phantoms, its ghosts, and its vampires. Leon Elias is a young and impoverished Lebanese man whose older sister had joined a Christian militia and has been killed. He becomes caught up in the recent "little war" in Beirut, when the Shi'a resistance/militia Hezbollah takes over most of the city. In this milieu--the emptied streets of Christian east Beirut, the old shell-scarred sandstone villas, the echoing gunfire--he becomes involved, only partly by choice, in the theft of a seriously valuable piece of artisanal jewelry, and is bitten--like a vampire--by its Armenian maker. Events take a ghostly and mysterious turn as the factions jostling for power in Beirut begin to align against him and his family, and he is