The Dusk Visitor: Stories from Syria

A collection of 36 short stories from a Raqqa, Syria native whose home was commandeered by ISIS and later destroyed by coalition airstrikes.

Musa Al-Halool developed these stories based on a sense of embitterment toward the Syrian regime. Now, after his country has fallen from the grips of an obtuse and rigidly bureaucratic state into the uncertainties of war . . . he presents his stories as the response of one still-same voice in the midst of madness.

Musa Al-Halool’s stories depict a Kafkaesque Middle Eastern world. The collection opens with eight political fables in a chapter titled Ratistan . . . or the country of Rats. These fables introduce themes which are picked up and developed in the later stories or simply serve as counterpoint to the longer pieces.

The Dusk Visitor is an object lesson for Western readers. In just a few words, it invokes the warnings of Ernest Hemingway about the dangers of Fascism in 1920s Italy and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s . . . that resulted in WWII. The author shows in compelling detail that Middle East dictators and the upside down world of security state rule in the Middle East are the reward for functioning civil societies where a few too many ”good people” find it more convenient to collaborate rather than to resist.

Western readers, in their arrogance, are accustomed to pity such dysfunctional societies. In The Dusk Visitor, the tables are turned. Musa Al-Halool forces us to look in the mirror: Middle Eastern style comical inanity and inefficiency as well as torture, mass murder, and other human rights horrors are just around the corner for the EU, UK, US, and other societies where it is OK to raise half-truths, lies, and exaggeration above traditional journalism, dilute the judiciary, gerrymander the election system, usher in strongmen who prefer to be rulers for life, and threaten legal action against one’s political opponents.

The Dusk Visitor is a MUST-READ for anyone concerned about the growth of subtle and overt fascism within modern civil society.

Born in the eastern countryside of the Syrian province of Raqqa, the erstwhile capital of ISIS, Musa Al-Halool has been a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Taif University, Saudi Arabia, since 2002. He is also a well-known and prolific literary translator in the Arab world with nearly forty titles to his name. He traveled to the United States in 1989 on a Fulbright scholarship, where he obtained his MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from Penn State University in 1991 and 1995.

After returning to Syria, Musa Al-Halool taught at Tishreen University for four years before leaving for Jordan, where he taught for three years, and from there to Saudi Arabia. In 2016, ISIS declared him an “apostate” and requisitioned both his country house and in-town villa in Raqqa. He has taught English and American literature.

It was in Jordan that Musa Al-Halool started writing short stories and poems in English. Afterward, he began writing in Arabic. He depicts ordinary folk with sympathy. His targets in government and the crony government economy, the corrupt, the arrogant, the mediocre, and the sycophantic—he skewers. Musa Al-Halool's translations include White Carnations by the distinguished Syrian novelist and academic Musa Rahman Abbas (co-translated with Dr Sanna Dhahir), Cune Press 2021.

Select Books by Musa Al-Halool Anguished Arabic (criticism in Arabic) From the Herb of Burzoy to the Serpent of Gilgamesh: Reflections on Literary Translation. (translation criticism in Arabic) Exodus to Istanbul (travelogue in Arabic) Literary Translation: Practical Applications in Translating Prose (a bilingual textbook) A New Grammar for the New World Order (poems and short stories in English) Bellwetheristan (a collection of short stories in Arabic)