Customer Reviews

Black Sunday

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before Thomas Harris, a respected reporter for the Associated Press and ace novelist, created the creepy-yet-charismatic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in his novels Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, he had already dabbled in another and even more frightening topic: a massive terrorist attack against a "soft" (undefended, usually civilian) target in his 1975 debut novel, Black Sunday.

Like The Sum of All Fears, a Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan Novel" that was clearly inspired by Harris' tautly written thriller, Black Sunday's plot focuses on a plan by Palestinian terrorists to commit a deadly and spectacular attack on a highly televised event: the Super Bowl.

The reason for the attack -- at least from the Palestinian side -- is a common thread that runs through both novels: America's unswerving support for Israel in the apparently never-ending Middle East conflict.

And just as Clancy --possibly taking his cues from this novel -- would later do in Sum, Harris not only has a dedicated group of terrorists to carry out this diabolical plan, he has a psychotic American co-conspirator on board, a man whose recent life has pushed him over the edge from understandable resentment to psychotic lust for revenge against his own country.

There, however, the similarities end, for whereas Clancy's obviously insane Marvin Russell was a murderous Native American of the Lakota tribe and was considered both untrustworthy and expendable by his Arab "allies" and was used as a mere conduit into the Denver area until the homemade nuclear bomb was in place in that Colorado city, Black Sunday's Michael Lander is a willing planner and executioner of Black September's spectacular plot to turn a blimp into a makeshift weapon of mass destruction. A Navy veteran with experience on both dirigibles and helicopters, Lander was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and spent six hellish years as a POW until the Paris Agreement ended American military involvement in Indochina and Hanoi released all the American prisoners.

For Lander, it is his Vietnam experience that is the catalyst for his willing embrace of the Black September terrorists. Ostracized by his fellow POWs for collaborating with the North Vietnamese and discovering that his wife has had an affair, Lander is pushed to the brink of madness by the hostility his fellow POWs -- especially the senior officer -- feel toward him. Unable to cope with his humiliation and anger, Michael Lander resigns his commission and goes job hunting, finding the going tough until, finally, he is hired by the Aldrich rubber company to fly blimps.

By now, however, Lander is plotting a most lethal sort of revenge upon the country he believes caused him to lose his pride, his honor, six years of his life, his manhood, and his wife. Inspired by the Black September attack on the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, he contacts the radical terrorist group, asking for explosives and technical assistance so he can convert the Aldrich blimp into a flying Claymore mine. The target: the Super Bowl championship game. The place: the new Superdome stadium in New Orleans.

Intrigued, the Palestinians send one of their deadliest -- and most beautiful -- operatives, Dahlia Iyad. She spends a year in the United States, cultivating, evaluating, and becoming intimate with Lander, a man she knows to be increasingly insane yet incredibly useful to Black September's goal of making America pay for her support of Palestine's hated enemy, Israel.

Harris takes the reader along on a transatlantic race against the clock as the terrorists make their detailed plans and get ever closer to accomplishing their deadly mission, while Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service), the CIA, and the FBI hunt the terrorists down after finding clues that point to an impending attack on American soil. Leading the hunt is Major David Kabakov, whose ruthless efficiency at chasing and killing Palestinian terrorists has earned him the dark-humored nickname of "the final solution." And as Harris interweaves the storylines of the hunter and hunted, the reader is enticed to keep reading to find out who will preservere....and who will die.

Harris masterfully flashes backward and forward through time, driving the terrorist plot forward step by step and describing the American-Israeli collaborative effort to find Dahlia and her comrades before they can carry out their plan in minute detail, all the while examining Lander's long spiral into murderous madness. The pace is fast and furious, giving the reader an excellent example of a well-crafted suspense novel that not only never loses focus or goes into unnecessary tangents, but is also grounded in the reality of the mid-1970s. It discusses such real-life events as the Munich Massacre, the Vietnam War, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, and the beginning of the spread of global terrorism. Black September, the Palestinian sponsors of Lander's plan, really existed, and so did most of the agencies and entities depicted in the novel, with Aldrich Rubber being a fictional stand-in for Goodyear.

Black Sunday not only marked the debut of a master of the suspense genre, but it was also made into a moderately successful motion picture which co-starred Bruce Dern and Robert Shaw.

This is the book that began the terrorism genre, and yes, many of the elements have been done to death over the years. (In an odd hommage, in Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, the terrorists set off a nuclear blast at the Denver Superbowl because they've read Black Sunday!) Still, 26 years after its first publication, it's still one of the best of the lot -- though Nelson DeMille's The Lion's Game is a brilliant updating. I just read it for the fifth time and loved it as much as the first. In The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Lecter tells Agent Starling that Jame Gumb's "pathology is a thousand time more savage" (than the average transsexual). Well, Lecter never doctored blimp pilot Lander. He's one of the great villains in popular fiction, mainly because Harris makes him so comprehensible.

All three of Thomas Harris' other books, Red Dragon, The Silence Of The Lambs, and Hannibal are masterpieces. Black Sunday was his first book and it's good, but Harris' signature style is not quite intact. It's a good book, interesting, a little slow in parts but nothing unforgivable. The detail is there, the sympathy for all characters is there, it's just, missing somthing. The polish his other books have I suppose. Thomas Harris is one of the great writers of our time, Black Sunday is well worth reading, both for entertainment, and for an interesting study on the evolution of an artist.

An ex veteran is hell bent on killing a whole lot of people. He proposes to turn a blimp into a giant claymore mine. Anyone ever having seen the damage a very small mine like a claymore can do can only imagine what destruction a larger version could do on an unknowing crowd.

This book gives lots of depth to the characters. Fully develops the madman's desire for a massive bloodbath on National TV. In light of the events of 9/11 one realizes just how possible this would have been.

Michael Lander is an ex-POW from Vietnam, who has taken up a civilian position flying the Aldritch blimp for the football each Sunday. However, his time as a POW has left him emotionally scarred and he embarks on a deadly plot, enlisting the help of an Arab terrorist group. Through the book, the details of the plan are gradually unveiled, where he plans to blow up the Superbowl, killing 80,000 spectators, including the president. In the first half of the book, sympathy is built up for the terrorists, by concentrating on the relationship between Michael and terrorist Dahlia Iiyad, adding an extra dimension to the book. Another thing I liked about the book, was the way Harris has continually referred back to how the incident relates back to Middle Eastern politics, which is the motivation for the terrorists' involvement.

My only gripe is that I felt the ending was a little weak, after such a brilliant book. This seems to be a feature of Thomas Harris' writing which is also apparent in The Silence of the Lambs. Nonetheless, I would recommend this book highly

Black Sunday has a kind of surreal timeliness that is frankly alarming. 30 years ago Thomas Harris looked for some groups that would be angry enough to commit mass murder on U.S. soil and seized on a psychotic veteran of Viet Nam and Palastinian/Arab terrorists (one of whom plotted the Munich massacre). It's now 30 years later and we still have Palastinian/Arab terrorists and we're not that far away from Timothy McVie's actions. It is depressing, no doubt, but it gives the book a resonance with current events that continues to make the book timely and suspenseful 30 years later.

The plot - Lander, the EXTREMELY disgruntled vet, concocts a plan to use his position as a blimp pilot to explode a bomb at the superbowl. For maximum effect, he needs plastique, and a lot of it. Enter the PLO, happy to supply the explosives for the chance to bring the war to American soil in retaliation for supplying Israel with arms and funding. Even Mohammar Khadafy (before his most recent "rehabilitation") plays a part, supplying the PLO with the funding and a ship in order to get the plastique to the U.S. Getting wind of the plot are two Mossad hitmen who come to the U.S. to try and impress on the FBI the seriousness of the threat. Mostly we follow the joint storylines of the terrorist preparations with the Mossad/FBI investigation. There are some close calls, and it all adds up to a fenetic climax, which some complain is overly short, but which makes the most sense and is therefore the most satisfying.

There are some obvious flaws in the book - for example, some of the backstories seem a little contrived, and the connection between the PLO and the blimp pilot is somewhat tenuous (American terrorists are entirely homegrown, and most would consider it traitorous to involve foreigners). Fortunately, once the plot is going, it flows logically and inevitably towards the conclusion, and your initial misgivings are quickly forgotten. Readers of Tom Clancy and others will note the impression Harris has obviously made on them. Clancy's books are more detailed, certainly, but his Sum of All Fears covers much of the same ground, except he uses a nuke instead of plastique.

So, overall, this is a rip-roaring suspense tale that has lost none of its relevence (in fact, it may have gained more of it!) in the 30 years since it was first published.

Being a fan of Thomas Harris's other work, I decided to give this book a chance. While the spy genre is not one which I favor, the author's other work made me think I might enjoy "Black Sunday". While I did enjoy the book on some levels, I found it disappointing on other levels.

Michael Lander is the ideal flunky for a terrorist organization. Angry at the government that abandon him after Vietnam and scorned by the wife that left him, Lander has little left to live for. Enter Dahlia Iyad. Possessing strong kinship with terrorists and anti-Israeli movements, she takes a liking to Lander. Opposing the terrorists is David Kabakov. With detective skill that would make James Bond green with envy, Kabakov decodes the plan of the terrorists.

Being the first major publications of Thomas Harris, this book is quite raw on a lot of levels. The ending of the book seems very rushed. The author spends most of the book leading to the day of the planned attack. Yet the authors spends approximately twenty pages explaining how the attack unraveled. Even more implausible is the method by which Kabakov foils the muderous plot. At other times in the book, the author is too busy introducing characters which the reader never gets to know. These characters should have ended up on the editing room floor. There are way too many people in this book for just over 300 pages.

This book bears an eerie resemblance to a 9/11 style attack for a book written in the mid-1970's. While the book may have been exemplary in its time, the flaws of the plot are more clearly revealed today.

Thankfully this book stays away from Harris' more recently developed penchant for gratuitous descriptions of blood and violence. Black Sunday is well paced, suspenseful and has a very consistent and very believable story line. My only complaint is that character development seems weak. At times we are watching the events unfold without any real attachment to the characters involved. Fortunately, the plot was strong enough to compensate and I was left with a positive impression overall. A fine book.

My only real complaint about this book is that it was way too short, especially the climax. But other than that this book was well written. The story line is plausible in any day and age and is not limited to the time when it was written (1975, I believe). It is basically about a vindictive vet who links up with a terrorist group to plan and execute the most shocking and destructive terrorist plot in history. But the best part of the book has to be the gift that our friendly veteran gives to his ex-wife to make amends, you have to read it to understand it fully. It really is a shame Thomas Harris does not write more novels. Of course that is just my opnion, I could be wrong.

Having seen the film a long time ago, and of course, reading some of Harris' other works, I finally got around to reading this one. It's his first book, so it's not as polished (or as long) as a really first rate thriller usually is, however, it was a quick and enjoyable read and I'd highly recommend it to any that enjoy the genre of thriller/spy/terrorist nature.
Post 9/11 brings an era where this type of book is no longer highly speculative fiction, but rather a story that could turn into a horrible reality all too easily. I hope that our public officials that are in charge of our security have read this book (and all like it).