A review by morgob
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

4.0

This book terrified me. I actually read the first two chapters of this book while I was in high school, in an advanced biology class when we were studying epidemics and how they work. It scared me so much at the time that it has obviously stayed in my thoughts after all these years, but now I felt like I had the courage to read the rest of the book. I was almost wrong in that assumption. After rereading the first two chapters again, I was still terrified and horrified and all the other kinds of "fied" that say how scared you are. I also have an extremely active imagination, which is often ridiculous, and even began to panic about having a fever or stomach sickness myself. Impossible, I know, but still, it shows how much it bled into my mind. I was on edge through the whole first half of the book. That just goes to show you that sometimes the scariest stories are the true ones. Richard Preston did an excellent job with this book, giving enough information to be incredibly descriptive while also turning it into a story. The characters were even well explained. I didn't feel like any of our "main" characters were flat or faceless. It reminded me a bit of Michael Crichton's writing, actually, with the way that he gave plenty of scientific information while still managing to make the story captivating and hard to put down. I seriously read this book every chance I got on my phone, even during my prep period and lunch break, and way too late at night. I also read the excerpt from his other novel featuring Ebola, Crisis in the Red Zone and that seems very interesting as well. I might check that one out later.