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The Cobra Event by Richard Preston Recommendation: •••
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Brainpox I paid no attention to Richard Preston’s novel, The Cobra Event, when it came out in 1997. A combination of the terrorist actions of September 11, 2001 and reference to his novel in the new book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (reviewed 12/26/01 and highly recommended), I decided to open it up. I suggest you do the same. Preston describes the plausible scenario of a disgruntled scientist developing a strain of virus that was capable of killing millions of people. The novel presents a suspenseful story full of accurate science, which makes this a horror story. Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the book: “The transformational power of a virus never failed to impress him, even when it worked inside caterpillars. It was interesting to see how the virus could turn an insect into a bag of virus crystals. The virus could take over its host and keep the host alive – still hungry, still feeding – even while it converted the host’s body almost entirely to virus crystals. The virus also stopped the molting process of the insect, so that it never became an adult. It stayed young and ate and ate until it was nothing but crystals. The human strain of the virus could transform the human brain into a bag of virus crystals and make the human eat and eat and eat. The human species is hungrier than a hungry insect. With its monstrous, out-of-control appetite, it is ruining the earth, he said to himself. When a species overruns its natural habitat, it devours available resources. It becomes weakened, vulnerable to infectious outbreaks. A sudden emergence of a deadly pathogen, an infectious killer, reduces the species back to a sustainable level.” Enough of this book is gory and frightening, and the pace moves quickly enough, that you’re likely to finish it in two or three sittings, unless, like me, you need to take a break from it and pretend that this fiction couldn’t ever really happen. Yeah, right. Steve Hopkins, January 16, 2002
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