The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, Random House, New York, 1994
7/22/11 Beginning to page 105
I started reading this book cold. That is, I knew nothing about it except that the AP Bio teacher recommended it, and I needed to read it before my students returned to school. One city librarian seemed to think I was looking for a romance novel and did not understand why I was so anxious to get it. I blush. The second librarian said that he read this book in ninth grade and LOVED it.
Interesting book to love. It is disgusting. I read Stephen King’s comments about the book on the back, and I can see how he, contemporary master of horror, would enjoy this book. It begins with a series of “entries” into Level 4 biohazard, and then we meet a man, Monet, who ultimately contracts the Marburg virus, dies, and gives it to Dr. Musoke, who survives. ¼ of the people who contract this virus die. This is compared to 9/10 of the people who contract the Zaire Ebola virus (a veterinary mother of two had a near miss with this one). Another Ebola (whose victims I have not yet met) has a ½ survival rate.
The horror part comes in as the author describes, repeatedly, in gruesome detail, the symptoms of the virus as the eyes turn red and the organs liquefy. Gross. Really, I think the author could describe the symptoms once and then omit the future descriptions.
Embedded into the yuck are narratives about the victims and the people who work discovering and attempting to cure these diseases (this disease? References are made to HIV, and so I’m not sure if these viruses are mutations from a common ancestor, or if they are separate though similarly structured entities—perhaps this will become clearer later in the book. I discover with the scientists as the book traces the Ebola journey). The author also includes pictures of the viruses and information about the danger of the diseases. Another aspect of the horror—also likely appealing to S. King—is the suggestion of how vulnerable the entire human population is. Think of how often our ignorance could kill us. In one town, for example, the practice at the time (mid-1970s) was to use the same needles on several patients. Thus, the hospital passed the virus. The author describes it: “The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior. […] It is not easy, however, to separate brain damage from the effects of fear. If you were trapped in a hospital where people were dissolving in their beds, you might try to escape…” (68). The details of the patients’ experiences certainly evoke my sympathy even as I worry how we easily could do the same thing to ourselves in the US (or how Monet’s airline travel could now so easily sweep the disease among the continents and wipe us all out). What practices do we have now that we may unwittingly use to kill ourselves? Oil drilling? Landfills? Using recycled (and germy??) products?
I’ll leave my thoughts on the occasional clunkiness of the writing for another time. I will say, though, that having just read Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, this book lacks some of the qualities that elevate that book (besides, in my opinion, better writing): an index, an extensive list of references, and clear indicators of why this author is trustworthy. Those elements would strengthen this book; nevertheless, it is believable in the way that many disaster stories shock us into the memento mori theme.
