Descent: Lockdown 2020

by Assaf Raz

“You could have stopped it...”

On the eve of the United States’ second Civil War in 2024, these words haunt the man who had prepared for this very moment. As he picks up the phone to make a choice that will determine the fate of the country, he can’t help but reflect on the final moments of the old world back in 2020 and the thousands of brutal steps that led him here.

When the Dragon pandemic stopped the world in 2020, Retired Marine Colonel Tanner Washington held his breath and his wife and children close as he watched the events unfold. As the country his family had served for generations descended into fear, social unrest, and the slippery slopes his grandfather had warned against, Tanner was forced to decide between two worlds and face the aftermath of his final answer to the

“How far would I go to protect my family from evil?”

Lockdown 2020 - Descent is the first installation of the Old Glory Saga, an alternate history dystopian series.

512 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 27, 2023

About the author

Assaf Raz immigrated from Israel to Venice Beach, CA, in his early twenties and began the journey to citizenship in a country he had long studied and revered. For more than two decades, he built his American Dream through real estate and a handful of other entrepreneurial pursuits. After a spiritual rebirth in his early thirties, he found the woman from his dreams, started a family, and began to write. First, he wrote a short memoir about his awakening (Rite of Passage) and then he started a novel fueled by his love of Roman history and the alternative history genre. He quickly set aside that project for the Old Glory saga when his concerns about America piqued in 2020 during the lockdown and riots that unfolded in the streets where he lived and worked. Assaf and his family have been on the road since 2022.

Reviews

[readeronrehab · Rating 5 out of 5]

For obvious reasons, this novel feels uncomfortably close to home. How can we forget the COVID lockdowns, masks, social pressure, fear-driven compliance, obsession with media updates, and the disconnection from family, friends, and neighbours? Still, the book doesn’t linger on realism for too long. The plot quickly develops into a futuristic society, focusing not on the virus itself but on the social and political chaos it creates as public health morphs into social enforcement and riots become a tactical strategy to control society. One of the questions the main character, Tanner Washington, has to answer, which resonates with the ideological chaos we are living these days, is: At what point does adaptation become surrender?

This story is a solid one because it contains strong social and ideological themes that made me reflect on who gets to decide supremacy when a society is at risk of being divided by an extremist ideology, and how power operates when it no longer answers to governmental authority. 🤔🤓