The Axis Rules in an Alternate WWII - an Editorial Review of "Wolves at the Gate"

Book Blurb:

Lieutenant Jim Fraser was, in turns, eager and terrified. His Baker Company led the American offensive to liberate Charleston, but would his wife, Florrie, and their twin girls trapped behind German lines survive the coming battle?

Wolves at the Gate is the first of a series of three alternative history thrillers from Bart Stark imagining another World War II. Due to a twist of history during his youth, Adolf Hitler turns west and out to sea against England and the United States in alliance with fascist Japan and Italy. After the British Empire falls, the Axis turn on an outnumbered and unprepared America. Instead of being waged in far-away lands, total war rages across the Hawaiian Islands and South Carolina, down our streets and into the homes of our families.

Styled as Robert Conroy’s 1942 meets Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, with the multi-perspective scope of Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series, Wolves at the Gate is perfect for fans of Philip K. Dick, S.M. Stirling and David Downing.

The series is also available as an audiobook at Spotify or your other favorite retailers.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/jHQj

Author Bio:

Bart Stark is a U.S. Army paratrooper and a combat veteran, who later entered a life of crime as a prosecutor and defense attorney. Now, Bart is beginning the third act of his life as a novelist.

After leading a vagabond life which took them across America and Europe, Bart and his wife settled in the highlands of Panama. His favorite pastime is hiking his dogs in the jungle and daydreaming dystopian futures for his characters.

Editorial Review:

Title: Wolves at the Gate

Author: Bart Stark

Rating: 4.0

"Wolves at the Gate" by Bart Stark is a chilling, meticulously engineered alternate-history epic that invites readers to reflect on how disturbingly close the novel's imagined world feels to our own. It is not simply speculative history, but a far-reaching re-imagining of how power, chance and human vulnerability might collide when the world shifts off its familiar course.

"Tightly packed in a DFS-230 assault glider, the German paratrooper and his eight man squad flew over the darkened countryside, in the midst of dozens more of the silent birds. Brightly burning tracers leading streams of steel projectiles arced up from Englander anti-aircraft batteries, reaching out into the moon-less sky for the Luftwaffe aircraft. Here and there, a Tommy gunner would find a glider, shredding its thin canvas skin, along with the human cargos within."

This passage in the first chapter pulls you bodily into a war rather than allowing you to observe it from a distance. The perspective feels less like narration and more like immersion, as if the reader has been strapped into the glider beside the men, breathing the same, thin air. The glider is rendered less like a machine and more like a creaking vessel of fate- like a coffin with wings, and Stark makes you feel its fragility as keenly as that of the men inside it. Every jolt, every flicker of tracer fire, and every near miss vibrates through the prose, giving the battlefield a visceral, tactile immediacy rather than an abstract quality. And even as you recognize that the men inside are invaders descending on another nation's soil, the book refuses to grant easy moral alignment. Stark's description of the men as "human cargo" deliberately strips away individuality, suggesting how war reduces people to objects to be transported, deployed, and expended. The passage also serves as a quiet reminder that, beneath the uniforms and the strategies, these are human beings, yet war often asks them to function as replaceable parts of something much larger than themselves.

"According to the radio reports, a Nelson class battleship anchored the center of the enemy line. It was a big bastard, with nine heavy sixteen inch guns arrayed across three turrets on the front of the ship. A killer whale among dolphins! The Inglese gunnery unfortunately proved its historic reputation for accuracy. By the second volley, the enemy found its range and a large caliber round ripped through the deck of the Italian battleship Cavour, subtracting it from the battle."

The metaphor here, "a killer whale among dolphins" on a literal level, clarifies the imbalance of power. You get the sense that the Nelson is not merely another ship in formation, but a singular, dominant presence, heavier, and more lethally armed and armored than anything around it. One feels like it is less of a vessel and more of a moving fortress, that seems to embody Britain’s hard-won naval tradition. Killer whales hunt with terrifying coordination and intelligence, and that association subtly frames the British as disciplined, surgical and almost inevitable in their lethality. And while this scene feels methodical and intentionally decelerated, the mention of the nine heavy sixteen inch guns forces the reader to mentally register the scale of firepower at play. The slowing of the prose mirrors the precision of naval gunnery itself- calculated, measured and inexorable, and here you get to understand viscerally why this "killer whale" must be neutralized fast or the balance of this engagement could decisively shift.

"The anticipation was almost unbearable. Jim Fraser raised his fist to halt the patrol and crept up to where the point man was kneeling. From there, they both crawled to the edge of the woods. Across a field was a row of houses along Main Street. Florrie and the girls should be in one of them..."

After fleets and generals, Stark narrows the lens to one man and one street. You feel the weight of every meter that he must cross, as he advances towards the people that he loves. The war shrinks from grand strategy to what feels like a single field, yet somehow larger because of what is at stake. The author's genius here is in how he fuses tactical tension with emotional urgency, rendering the reality of the occupation through fear, as well as through images of bodies in the streets and families on the run. He further makes every pause, every whispered order, and every rustle of leaves amplified through the well-hewn character, Fraser, who is not just a soldier but a father and a husband. In this light, the idyllic small-town America of Main Street is transformed into a landscape of dread, where ordinary houses become potential traps and where normal silence feels menacing.

One of Stark’s real achievement lies in how he designs his central figures as mirrored and interlocking parts of a single moral architecture. Helmut Arpke and Jim Fraser are not simply counterparts by nationality rather, they are parallel expressions of what professionalism looks like under radically different banners. Arpke moves with a cool, almost surgical precision, a soldier shaped by doctrine, discipline, and an unyielding faith in command while Fraser, by contrast, operates from a more intimate register. What makes them so compelling is that none of them feel like a mere narrative instrument but as fully realized men moving through a war that tests both their skill and their humanity.

Stark’s prose is disciplined rather than lyrical, which suits military subject matter. His metaphors are memorable and the dialogue he employs though sparse, feels functional. The tension in this book operates on two planes- tactical, from credible military dilemmas and two, moral. "Wolves at the Gate" is not merely a “what if” story, rather, a warning disguised as a story about how contingency and cruelty can reorder the world in days. Stark makes you ride with paratroopers over Dover, stand on the bridge of a battleship in the Channel, and crawl with a desperate father toward Main Street in Summerville. And that experience is what follows you long after the last page.

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