September 11th, Charlie Kirk, and Exposed King
/I am sitting here this morning feeling a sense of numbness as I deal with the normal emotions of September 11th coupled with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I say ‘normal’ because as an NYPD first responder on that day I have grudgingly accepted that the emotions are part of who I am now. I stopped trying to make sense of it long ago, and now I just accept that there is an ebb and flow that I must ride out annually. I don’t fight it; I just let the memories come in and go out, because you cannot make ‘sense’ of what happened twenty-four years ago.
On September 11th, 2001, we came together as a country. At first we felt rage and anger about the terrorist attack. Then we felt the collective pain as we came to terms with the fact that we’d lost thousands of our fellow citizens; men, women and children who would never see another sunrise; people who woke up and died because of someone else’s hatred. Then there was a brief moment of solidarity: United We Stand, Never Forget, Remember the Heroes… but like most altruistic slogans, it had no depth.
Yesterday, September 10th, 2025, a 31-year-old husband and father of two small children was assassinated in Utah. His crime? Having a dissenting opinion.
Charlie Kirk was on a university campus, a world where dissenting opinions have traditionally been fostered and embraced, but yesterday we were told, in no uncertain terms, that this world no longer exists.
A man was murdered in cold-blood and many cheered at his demise.
A bullet became the ultimate form of censorship.
It reminded me of the line spoken by Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin’s book: Clash of Kings – “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
This is America now. This is who we have become. Not United, but divided to the point that murder has become an acceptable course of action against those whom we disagree with.
I released my last James Maguire book, Glass Castle, in 2019. As most good authors, I had the working plot for the next book, Exposed King, in my head. I remember that I struggled a bit with it, because it had what I felt was a radical leap, or, to use the old Happy Days trope, I felt like I was ‘jumping the shark’ with this story-line, but I told myself that I could polish it and make it plausible. I’d moved on to the next Alex Taylor book, The Killing Game, as I compiled notes and ideas and fleshed-out the outline.
Then Covid-19 happened.
I thought it was my time to shine, to get the downtime I needed to write my little heart out.
I finished The Killing Game, I wrote Awakening, a genre bending police procedural meets vampires, got in another Cold Case novella, and even managed to write: Shadow Strike, a Maguire origin story, but Exposed King languished in a file on my computer.
I wrote some chapters, which were more like snippets or frustrated paragraphs, in fits and starts, struggling as I went, as if some unseen force was trying to block me. As a writer, I knew I had to walk away. Forcing it would never work. I kept asking myself why I was having so much of a problem.
It’s fiction. I’m a writer. This is what I do.
The truth is I fear that Exposed King won’t be fiction. The premise is less of a ‘who done it’ and more of a ‘what if.’
As I said earlier, the plot came to me during Glass Castle, pre-dating Covid, but also George Floyd and before the Defund the Police movement and all the other radical events since. With each passing day, I saw my fictional plot growing potentially more real, and it scared me.
America is changing, and not for the better.
For nearly a hundred years, Superman’s iconic motto was: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” and yet today we find ourselves facing an America where truth is subjective, justice is no longer impartial, and the American way is abhorrent to a large swath of society.
I know I have to finish Exposed King; I just hope it remains within the realm of fictional work and does not become a prescient warning.
A part of me wonders if George Orwell felt the same way when he published 1984.
May God have mercy on us.
9/11 World Trade Center Cross taken by anne bybee
