Haven of Dust is a novel of speculative dystopian fiction, set in the near future and describing the breakdown of American society in the face of the Second Civil War, a contest that pits Red states against Blue after a major economic collapse. Recounted in the third person, the narrative centers on the experiences of Karima Makauskas, a forty-six-year-old high school English teacher whose calm, orderly existence in an Illinois town is disrupted by a massive predawn artillery bombardment. When refugee life in Chicago is rendered impossible by food shortages, social unrest and air attacks, Karima decides her only option is to make a desperate effort to rejoin her twelve-year-old son, who has been cut off from her in California. On a wider scale the novel describes the breakdown of a polarized American society, but it concentrates just as much on the character of Karima, a woman whose confused identity and dysfunctional family have left her unsure of her ability to cope with hardship and war. Her often conflicted relationship with her principal traveling companion, the headstrong teenager Molly, mirrors the ideal condition of the country as a whole: they are at odds with each other, yet forced by circumstances to cooperate and coexist. Although citizens of a Blue state, Karima and Molly suffer abuse at the hands of men from both warring sides, and thus come to the conclusion that their only real enemy is the war itself. Karima's experiences during a year of wandering, and the lessons she learns about human nature, are meant to reflect the agony of a nation riven in two. As she moves through the ravaged landscape, often on foot when her fuel runs out, she encounters people who have attempted to create parallel societies in order to offset the effects of civil conflict. In every case, these "pocket paradises," sometimes founded on religious or pseudo-religious precepts, provide no lasting solace to Karima and her companions. Forced to reassess all her former values as a high-minded schoolteacher, Karima ends up living like a bandit in the wilderness, plundering, destroying and killing in order to stay alive, enduring all the brutality and degradation of the nation as a whole. Haven of Dust is inspired by the current political atmosphere in the United States, where one hears serious references to such terms as secession and civil war. The emphasis of this work is on the general tragedy of such a war and its effect on individual civilian refugees, without explicit promotion of any political point of view. The narrative is conceived in the American tradition of the dystopian road novel, in which refugee characters make their way toward a vaguely defined geographical goal while gaining social and moral insights from the communities they visit along the way, in the fashion of Huckleberry Finn. Haven of Dust comes to approximately 127,860 words.
