“This glorious, broken beacon.”

Ellen Adams’s relationship to the United States of America is complicated. She loves her country, but she recognizes its flaws. Her home can be both glorious and broken, but she hopes to show the world the glory by fixing the country’s problems. Her patriotism stems from the potential of the United States to function as a beacon that will inspire other countries around the world. To Ellen, the United States has the potential to be inspiring, but she will need to work hard to show the rest of the world that this inspirational potential still exists.

“Tick, tick, tick.”

The plot of State of Terror is a relentless rush to prevent a bomb at in the United States. The novel directly addresses the urgency of the bomb threat, incorporating the ticking clock into the prose of the novel. Every second counts for Ellen and Anahita as they try to save lives, so staccato interruptions like “tick, tick, tick” (39) remind the reader of the pressing nature of the problem. Just as the characters cannot ignore the ticking timer, the timer itself intrudes on the prose and forces the reader to remember the imminent deadline.