When a wolf was just a wild dog.

The outraged and fed-up citizens from across the nation who call themselves Changers have captured the Capitol, killed hundreds of members of Congress by guillotine (to say nothing of members of the Supreme Court and dozens of government workers) and locked the rest up in the Capitol basement. With no Executive branch to be found (no one is really sure who the President even is), no one knows who is going to fire the next shot.

Which is when Chase enters the picture.

Young Princeton scholar Chase Selby, along with eleven other great American thinkers, has been selected to act as a “Reasoner” - meaning, literally, one of the last reasonable people left in the United States. This group has been given the job of brokering a peace between what’s left of the U.S. federal government and the extremely well-armed, well-organized, and handy band of citizen revolutionaries who call themselves the Changers.

Arriving in Washington by train (air travel is finished), Chase knows he is coming to a city already split in two. The Changers control one half and the GOR (the US government) controls the other. It’s an uneasy truce, if you can call it that, and it isn’t helped by the fact that one of the young Changer leaders – an incredibly dynamic proponent of extreme violence who goes by the name of Sister Sheena – has made it clear that as far as she’s concerned, the Reasoner compromise is dead before it starts.

Unfortunately, once he meets his fellow Reasoners, Chase begins to have doubts himself. Historians, intellectuals, Nobel laureates, economists, and academics managing a whole nation? Their capacity to lead seems doubtful, particularly when word starts to filter back that the Changers may have accidentally laid their hands on something far more daunting than a guillotine on the Capitol steps: nuclear weapons. It’s hard to reason your way around WMD.

Taking de facto charge of the confused Reasoners, Chase moves to enlist help from the head of the U.S. Armed Forces, but the attempt goes awry, leading to the attempted assassination of the Changers’ other leader -- the electric and terrifying Jeff Beavenstock. But who ordered this assassination? Chase begins to suspect that there is another force at work here – someone much more powerful than all of them – and that it might possibly be the entity who goes by the name of The Wolf.

In order to save the nation, Chase is forced to take on a role he never envisioned for himself – that of leader. In this capacity, he explores the meaning of nationhood as well as the country’s obsession with violence, conspiracy, and class separation, Chase must also turn to the tools he deplores in order to create a peace.

A Feast of Wolves is a journey into an incredibly rich alternate America. Here moms and dads camp out on the National Mall and engage in group torture, members of Congress are murdered on primetime television in order to win political and ratings points, and a twenty-four-year-old holds an entire nation under her radical spell by calling for ever more blood. And all the while, our hero struggles to find a way to create a future for an America that seems determined to destroy itself.

This is not just a terrific read. It is a cautionary tale constructed around the fantasy of an entire nation ripping itself apart.