Book Review: A Dangerous Freedom
A Dangerous Freedom, John Ruane. Permuted Press, March 31, 2021, Print and Kindle, 236 pages.
Reviewed by Sue Merrell.
John Ruane’s latest book, A Dangerous Freedom, is a tale for our times. Mass shootings, so realistic they appear pulled from the nightly news, dot scene after scene in the book. This provides a pretty convincing background for the book’s central question: Is it time to get a gun?
The book opens on 9/11/2001 when the main character, Dylan Reilly, is a sophomore at a Chicago Catholic High School. It’s a great way to instantly grab the reader’s attention because there isn’t an American over 25 who doesn’t have vivid memories of where they were that day.
Then the tale fast forwards more than a decade to the day when Dylan and his wife Darlene are in New York visiting the recently opened 9/11 museum. Almost instantly, they find themselves caught in one of the senseless mass shootings that seem to have become a daily occurrence.
As common as such shootings are, most of us have never actually seen one. Yet, in a matter of months, this unlucky couple manages to be caught in three. It’s the kind of unlikely coincidence central to most thrillers and mysteries, and it provides the necessary motivation for a religious peace lover like Dylan to grab a gun and start shooting back.
Actually, Dylan grabs a pair of guns, pearl-handled Smith & Wesson six-shooters that are so out-of-step with today’s high-magazine automatics that his magical transformation becomes more fantasy than bloody revenge. In each of the book’s remaining mass shooting scenes, Dylan shows up at just the right moment, a cross between Wyatt Earp and Superman, offering the bad guys a chance to throw down their weapons and surrender. When they refuse, he blasts them away with lightning speed. He is lauded as America’s hero and the fastest shooter in the world.
Everything about the new Dylan is just a bit over-the-top, including his perfect marksmanship. However, this exaggeration is a wise choice on the author’s part because it paints the “good guys with guns” scenario as the victory we want to imagine instead of weighing the story down with the inevitable angst and mistakes a world of armed good guys could create.
In addition to Dylan, the book follows three other stories. Haydon Huff is the troubled son of a famous 1960s activist (ala one of the Chicago Seven). Arman Fazan is the American-born son of Persian immigrants facing school bullies. And then there’s a group of irredeemable jihadists. All the stories intersect eventually. It’s an ambitious project difficult to pull off well. Unfortunately, too many lengthy scene-setting pages get in the way of the action.
Despite these rough spots, I think Dylan Reilly might just have the chutzpah to become an American hero.