The Hot Zone (1994)

Author: Richard Preston | Page Count: 418

She had bled around the edges of the Band-Aid. She did not see any monkey blood on her hand.
She put the last glove under the faucet. The water was running and it filled up the glove. The glove swelled up like a water balloon. She dreaded the sudden appearance of a thread of water squirting from the glove, the telltale of a leak, a sign that her life was over.

A true story about an outbreak of Ebola virus in a suburb of Washington D.C. Written more as a thriller than a historical account worked in making the story incredibly dramatic and more horrifying than any actual horror novel if one were to think about the possibilities put forward in the text. The book covers many principal characters from the first outbreak of the so called filoviruses or thread viruses as they first appeared in Africa and the ensuing chaos they wreaked on the populace of Sudan and Zaire and the possible sequence of events that led to their traveling to the U.S. The workers at a monkey house stumble upon some sick monkeys which will eventually turn into a huge joint operation between the Army and CDC to prevent an outbreak that could endanger 90 percent of the population.

Preston weaves the history of the viruses and the many characters surprisingly well as the story is easy to follow despite the large number of participants and multiple events happening simultaneously. Writing it in the style of a thriller was a good decision as writing it any other way that could possible make it uninteresting would be a shame.  It will keep you up at night if you imagine the filoviruses spreading the same way that say HIV has spread. It would be a world changing event. Riveting stuff in a surprisingly quick read.

4½ Livers turned as hard as salami out of 5

Haunted (2005)

Author: Chuck Palahniuk | Page Count: 411 Pages

"So, my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.

Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt."

Chuck Palahniuk is, for me, an author who becomes less impressive the more you read of him. When I first discovered him as a teenager, I was enthralled. I copied quotes from his novels onto the back of notebooks, and I read his stories over and over. But the more of his work I consumed, the more obvious his formulas became, and the less I enjoyed his stories. There are Palahniuk novels I still thoroughly enjoy to this day- Invisible Monsters is a favorite- but I can't shake the feeling that he's been writing the same book over and over again for years.

This is why I was so interested and excited by Haunted. A short story collection would force him to break away from his usual form and would let me appreciate the black humor and colorful characters that lead me to enjoy his work in the first place. However, none of the stories were particularly impressive, and the story that connected each tale together was fairly poor. There are poems to compliment each chapter of the book, but they come across as tacked on and, much like Palahniuk's novels, feel like he's writing the same thing over and over again.

The most famous story in this collection is "Guts", which gained attention after repeated incidents of vomiting at public readings. Read "Guts" here, go throw up on something, and give this book a pass.

1.5 skinny Saint Gut-Frees out of 5.