their point of view, are caught between these worlds, liminal—for one reason or another. They are pulled on and influenced and manipulated and seduced and bullied by the extreme ends of the spectrum that are primarily interested in the extermination of their supposed foes.

Percy centralizes the liminality of his main characters and uses the tension surrounding it to explore the nature of and political uses of othering. While the novel draws, self-consciously it seems, on the age-old structure of star-crossed lovers, bridging a gap between worlds in their efforts to find love together, the romantic underpinnings of the novel never seem forced. The two characters in question, a young man named Patrick and a young woman named Claire, find each other under horrific circumstances. Patrick is the lonesurvivor of a terrorist attack aboard an airplane and Claire is the victim of a backlash against the population believed to be responsible. While Percy falls short in allowing his characters to develop psychological depth and nuance, he takes them, and the readers along with them, on such a bumpy and frenetic ride that it’s easy to forget how little we know about them. Percy introduces characters on the very front lines of the extremist struggles in the novel only when they are on the verge of destruction. The points of view that endure are those that straddle the line between worlds.

The world of Red Moon is our world right now, except with werewolves. The immediacy and resonance of such a story in the post-911 world is what