Forty Days at Kamas

Could a fascist regime take power in the United States, resulting in the nearly random imprisonment of mass numbers of Americans under trumped-up sedition charges? Twenty years ago, one would think ‘not a chance,’ and any author suggesting such an idea would be laughed out of the bookstore, even if the book itself was a novel. But as more and more people look at the state of the world and start quoting George Orwell, well, one starts to wonder.

That is the essential set-up for Preston Fleming’s lengthy, yet engrossing, novel Forty Days at Kamas. Set in the near future – 2024 to be exact – Paul Wagner is captured while attempting to escape with his family to London from their home in Pittsburgh and, instead, finds himself in a concentration camp in Kamas, Utah. Paul’s daughter, Claire, arrives in town trying to find her Dad, and once the inmates decide to break loose and form a rebellion, well, complications arise.

Forty Days at Kamas is intended as the first book of a trilogy. Fleming, a former employee of the U.S. Foreign Service brings his expertise to his plot. One cannot truly say that any aspect of this story could never happen here. From the intricacies of currency control, to the speculation of how the Unionist Party managed to take control of the U.S. Government through rigged voting machines, Fleming’s book is both informative and deeply disturbing.

Borrowing both from Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s epics of The Gulag Archipelago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovitch in its portrayal of life in a state gone bad, Forty Days in Kamas is an intriguing read.