from a very young age. Today, Weiss is utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, he became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE, The Hollywood Reporter, Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. He currently resides in Philadelphia with his fiancée, as well as an extensive collection of graphic T-shirts, movie posters, vinyl records, and a few books, of course.
Weiss's new novel is Beat the Devils.
[Writers Read: Josh Weiss; My Book, The Movie: Beat the Devils; The Page 69 Test: Beat the Devils]
At CrimeReads he tagged his ten "all-time must-read alternate history thrillers set against the backdrop of authoritarian and/or dystopian worlds that might have been." One title on the list:
Fatherland, Robert Harris (1992)Read about the other entries on the list.
Fatherland may just be my favorite entry on this list. It certainly was the biggest source of inspiration for Beat the Devils. Harris’s vision of afully-realized Germania is a masterclass in alternate history storytelling and a profound exploration of the phrase “history is written by the victors.”
If so-called “Master Race” had won the Second World War, to what extent would they whitewash their industrialized extermination program of Europe’s Jewish population? It’s a chilling question to which Fatherland (a Twilight Zone reflection of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series) provides an equally chilling answer.
When the corpse of one Josef Bühler washes up on the shores of the Havel, homicide detective and disillusioned Aryan, Xavier March, starts to unravel an immense conspiracy that’s got nothing to do with police corruption or shady land deals. In other words, all the expected beats of a noir mystery don’t apply here. This dangerous cover-up aims much higher: someone wants to put a tight lid on the Holocaust. If the attendees of the infamous Wannsee Conference (the 1942 meeting that set the Final Solution in motion) aren’t safe, then no one is.
Fatherland is among Jay Rayner's six best books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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