The End of October

Let's give credit where credit is due. Lawrence Wright does his research. He won the Pulitzer for non-fiction for his examination of Al-Qaed. He followed that up with an expose on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology which got turned into an HBO Documentary. Now he's trained his eye on a possible pandemic for this fictional thriller.

How did he do?

Well, we have a mysterious influenza virus that originates in Asia in the Spring of 2020 that sends economies into a tailspin, shuts down schools, overwhelms hospitals, has the American government playing catch-up while battling disinformation and wild conspiracies. Not too shabby.

The thing is his endgame is the near complete breakdown of human civilization. This was prompted by a question from Ridley Scott who, after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, wondered what would nudge humanity to this dystopian hellscape? And so he ups the ante with a bomb in Rome, rising tensions in the Middle East, and a Cold War threatening to go nuclear with Russia sabotaging critical American infrastructure. Things get pretty dark.

And here's where it veers into airport thriller territory. Unlikely hero, short, stooped and in need of a cane while being the foremost expert in disease that sees him traipsing the globe in a helicopter, private jet and a fast-attack submarine - naturally. He goes from hobnobbing with Middle Eastern royalty to working in the midst of viral hotspots. It's Dan Brown writing a pandemic novel.

So the writing isn't exactly the sharpest, but it's no less a page-turner. Where you find yourself gulping in nervous anticipation is how much he got right so far, and how much more death he predicts will arrive come the End of October.