It can't happen here: the fantasy worlds of War on Terror novels.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Prayers for the Assassin - The Last Fihad - The Last Days - The Ezekiel Option

ON THE MORNING of June 23, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales congratulated blowtorch-wielding agents for breaking up the "deadly plot" of seven Miami men who threatened to explode FBI offices and the Sears Tower. It sounded deeply frightening--until the facts about these sad-sack "terrorists" started to leak. The men who would have leveled America's tallest skyscraper were, in fact, blithering idiots. They didn't know where to get explosives. They begged their "Al Qaeda contact" (an undercover FBI agent) to subsidize the boots for their "Islamic army" costumes. Their leader "carried a cane through Liberty City and wore a cape or sometimes a bathrobe." The Miami Seven were the first gang to lose cred the moment they was busted.

But if they had little to offer serious terrorists and their causes, they did advance, ever so briefly, the idea that Islamic terrorists present a threat as grave and existential as that of communism during the Cold War. This is an article of faith for neoconservatives and liberal hawks alike. The framework of the Cold War, which pitted the United States against a rival superpower and an ideology that ruled one-third of the world's population, is applied to the West's struggle against the violent fringe of the world's second-largest religion. For this to make sense, Americans need to believe terrorists can take over Omaha as easily as Nikita Khrushchev could have nuked the Miami Seven's backyard.

So it's fitting that the War on Terror has finally produced some dystopian, end-is-nigh science fiction. Prayers for the Assassin, a breakout hit by the thriller writer Robert Ferrigno, attempts to do for militant Islam what the movie Red Dawn did for Soviet communism: Envision a world where the wrong side wins the war. In Ferrigno's fantasy, it's the year 2040 and the forces of freedom have been overwhelmed by the forces of Islam.

If this sounds like a hard sell, it is: Prayers for the Assassin's "Islamic States of America" has all the scares of an episode of Monster Chiller Horror Theater on story. The novel is overrun with a goofy cast of knife-fighting fedayeen and white-bearded Islamists with names like Mullah Oxley and "The Old One." Black-robed secret police shake down women for looking at the imam of Chicago's marriage advice Web site: "The imam of Chicago countenances abominations!" San Francisco is a hotbed of Shariah law where "they behead homosexuals at the Civic Center every week." And then there are plenty of...