Hangout

What’s the most appropriate place to meet a Kirkland writer whose Edgar Award–nominated alternative-history novels transform the U.S. into an Islamic Republic circa 2040, when Seattle is the capital, zombies roam the nuked ruins of Washington, DC, Muslim morality police flog unscarfed women in Seattle coffee shops, a genetically altered Muslim warrior heroically battles a 
mad Islamist dictator, and feral gangs invade the abandoned million-dollar mansions of the Sammamish Plateau?

Photo by Charlie Clay

“Shamiana,” suggests Robert Ferrigno, who’s in a mood to celebrate the August 11 publication of Heart of the Assassin, his first book in ten years to get a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and his sixth movie-option sale. “It’s a great restaurant.” Growing up in east Pakistan, the estalishment’s owners Tracy and Eric Larson attended plenty of festivities held in big, colorful tents called shamianas. Their bright, festive space, tucked away in a mall near the beach, gathers flavors from Pakistan, India and Bhutan in an aromatically heterodox blend. I dig into the Major Grey chicken curry as Ferrigno explains the pungent mulligatawny soup that is his peculiar literary career.

“When my wife and I moved here, we decided not to live in the Plateau. But I thought it would be fun to have crime and madness run amok in these pristine, perfect little developments.” Ferrigno’s Assassin trilogy isn’t just for fun, however. It’s his attempt to put big philosophical ideas into a thriller format, inspired by the shock of 9/11 and the precedent of Robert Harris’s 1993 Fatherland, an alternative history about the Nazis winning World War II.

“In times of economic collapse brought on by military adventures in the Middle East, the appeal of a fundamentalist religion is that it draws a clear divide between good and evil. In desperate times, that’s what people want.” So in Ferrigno’s future world, the Seattle-based Islamic fundamentalists are at war with the southern Bible Belt fundies and the Latin American Aztec fundies, while a dictator called the Old One tries to reinstate the Caliphate — as Osama Bin Laden wants to do.

So does Iran’s Ahmadinejad, a true believer in an Islamic Messiah. “The whole idea of the Old One as a Muslim Messiah — I wrote that before the guy in Iran was elected,” says Ferrigno. “And that’s his belief. Basically, today’s headlines are looking more and more like my book,” says Ferrigno. He gets panned in Pakistan’s equivalent of Time magazine, and praised by Pakistani intellectuals on the Internet. His trilogy is banned in Germany and Italy for offending religion, but its first of a dozen-plus foreign sales was in Turkey.

Ferrigno wasn’t always a controversial alternative historian futurist. Raised in fundamentalist Florida, he dropped out of philosophy grad school after one day, earned an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green, moved to Seattle in the 1970s, and tried to make a living playing poker. After he won one night at the 123 Club, a guy in the alley took his winnings away. “I don’t know if he was a sore loser,” says Ferrigno, “but I got a gun stuck in my face and was told to hand over the money.”

Fortunately, Ferrigno didn’t need much. His rent was $37.50 a month, and he got a job with the hippieish alternative paper The Seattle Sun. Ferrigno and his colleagues, revolted by a Sun cover about macramé, quit to start the punk music newspaper The Rocket, which fostered the grunge scene. Then Ferrigno became the Tom Wolfe of The Orange County Register, chronicling subcultures. “Surfers, skaters, repo men, hot-oil dancers. I learned more about writing in two months than I did in two years in the MFA program.”

He still had a hankering to write fiction, so he got up every day at four a.m. to write a crime novel. When his wife was pregnant with his first child, a medication almost killed both her and the child. “It makes you realize you don’t have as much time as you think to complete your dreams.” After eight years, Ferrigno quit his cushy job to gamble everything on a thriller peopled with the characters he’d met. His 1990 debut, The Horse Latitudes, hit bestseller lists and got him courted by Robert De Niro’s production company. Seven more thrillers followed. Ferrigno was established, alongside the likes of T. Jefferson Parker, as a respected member of the neo-southern California thriller school. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars, with more to follow.

But 9/11 stunned him into the biggest gamble of his career. He risked alienating his fans by penning the bizarre, dark, philosophically investigative, genre-crossing Assassins Trilogy, starting with Prayers for the Assassin. “My agent said I was committing career suicide.” Hollywood stopped calling, terrified by Muslim terrorist themes (and the lousy box office of such films). “When I first started, a lot of reviewers who liked it thought the premise was far-fetched. Now I get tons of e-mails saying, ‘Your book is so today that it’s really making me nervous.’”

The trilogy is getting more commercially successful as it rolls on, a juggernaut riding the tailwind of history. He needs the success, as a self-employed guy paying thirty thousand dollars a year for health insurance. But the books were making Ferrigno nervous. “Writing the trilogy was upsetting me. I needed something fun.” So he decided to write a more upbeat book about fanatics, a trio of imaginary ecoterrorists who are called the Monkey Boys, because they’re great at climbing things. “It’s a classic thriller, Monkey Bizness, to be published in 2010. There’s an interesting kidnapping, a ransom situation.”

The theme remains Ferrigno’s central one: “The narrow-minded pomposity of people with a hotline to truth, who know all the answers. Nothing is more dangerous than a guy convinced God’s talking to him.”

Shamiana:

10724 NE 68th St.
Kirkland, WA
shamianarestaurant.com