K is for Killing

"K is for Killing" is an alternate history novel written by Daniel Easterman. It takes place in a parallel 1940s United States in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president rather than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a consequence, a fascist organization calling itself the Amero-Aryan Alliance is brought to power and turns the country into a police state, complete with slavery, concentration camps, and ghettos.

Plot summary

The novel begins in 1940. Nazi Germany is at war with Great Britain, but the conflict has yet to spread beyond Europe. President Charles Lindbergh has declared the United States (now called the New American Republic) officially neutral. However, the days of American neutrality are waning as hard-line fascists led by Vice-President David Curtiss Stephenson push for an alliance with the Third Reich. While the question of American neutrality is debated, thousands of Jews, blacks, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, political dissidents, and homosexuals are interned in a vast network of concentration camps greater in number than those of Hitler's Germany. Suspected enemies of the state are monitored by the dreaded Federal Bureau of Internal Security (FBIS) lead by hardliner J. Edgar Hoover. The Ku Klux Klan, whose members compose the core membership of the ruling AAA (Aryan-American Alliance), rampages through the countryside, committing violence and murder with the full authority and assistance of the State.

On a chilly October night, a British S-Class submarine quietly slips into American waters and drops John Ridgeforth onto shore. He is a highly trained Anglo-American agent ordered by Winston Churchill to perform the single most important mission of the war: Guarantee American neutrality while simultaneously destroying the country's relations with Germany. To do this, John must assassinate Stephenson and make it look as though the Germans are responsible.

On his first night in the United States, John witnesses the lynching of an entire black family, including two small children. After attempting to leave, he is pulled over by a police officer who arrests him as a suspected foreign agent. John reacts quickly, killing the officer and dumping his body by the side of the road. He then departs for Washington DC where he intends to infiltrate Stephenson's inner circle by passing himself off as the cousin of the vice-president's wife, Laura.

Unbeknownst to Ridgeforth, Stephenson is already concocting a plan to assassinate Lindbergh. His co-conspirators, a concentration camp commandant named Jim Jackson, FBIS Chief Hoover, and a German diplomat named von Schillendorf, want Lindbergh eliminated before he discovers the secret German-American atomic bomb project.

The operation becomes complicated when Ridgeforth becomes infatuated with Stephenson's wife, then later discovers the vice-president is a pedophile.

Lindbergh and his wife are murdered in the White House and the crime pinned on two Jewish 'escapees' from a nearby Koncentration Kamp, leaving Stephenson free to assume the Presidency. Stephenson invites Hitler to the US to witness the first test of the German-American atomic bomb in New Mexico, and, having discovered that Ridgeforth has been having an affair with his wife, dumps her and his daughter at Ground Zero. Ridgeforth saves them (with the aid of an ex-lecturer Resistance member (and part-time pilot)) but the test is a success.

Delighted by the destructive force of the A-Bomb, Hitler is given even more to smile about when his Police Attache', Hans Geiger, informs him that a) the President's wife is a traitor, b) she's been having an affair with a British agent, and c) Stephenson himself has been sexually abusing their daughter. Hitler confronts Stephenson with this evidence, radically shifting the balance-of-power between Nazi Germany and KKK Amerika.

The novel ends with Stephenson being killed in a struggle with his own wife when he tries to strangle her, but the crime is blamed on the Nazis and his successor (Joe Kennedy) severs all diplomatic contact between the US and Germany. Ridgeforth and Mrs. Stephenson escape to Britain, but the War goes on.

It is not explained how Joe Kennedy, a Catholic in a country where Catholics are oppressed alongside the Jews and Blacks, could hold the position of Speaker of the House in a Klan-dominated Administration, even taking into account his famously pro-Nazi and anti-British views.

The use of prefaces culled from various 'official' textbooks at the start of each sub-section of the book allows Easterman to give texture to his fictionalised Amerika. The simple list of Koncentration Kamps in the US and Germany is chilling in that it shows the New Amerikan Republic having many, many more. The extract referring to the new laws changing the spelling of American-English words (California becomes Kalifornia, Congress becomes Kongress, etc) shows how insidious and arrogant the KKK rulers of Amerika really are. The use of quotes from a scholarly work written decades after the novel's period and referring to America under the Klan Administration suggest that, at some point in the future, the AAA will be overthrown.

References

Easterman, Daniel. "K is for Killing". London, England: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1997.