From School Library Journal
YA?Warning?not for faint hearts or weak stomachs! In 1989, an obscure filovirus travels from the African rain forest to a lab near Washington, D.C., where the monkeys quickly sicken and die. Preston traces the history of the Warburg and Ebola filoviruses in minute, horrific detail that is as fascinating to read as it is alarming to contemplate?these filoviruses have the capability to mutate and possibly cross species. There are extraneous descriptions of scenery and of the characters' lives, but these passages serve to relieve the mounting tension and terror as the virus spreads and the CDC, the Army, and a private firm work out a containment plan to prevent a mass epidemic. YAs interested in science or fans of Stephen King or Michael Crichton will find this a fast-paced medical chiller right to the last disturbing page.?Judy Sokoll, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Expanded from Preston's 1992 New Yorker article, this account of a lethal virus run amok is Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain come true. In the fall of 1989, imported monkeys at a Reston, Virginia, facility began dying of a mysterious illness. Was it simian hemorrhagic fever (fatal to monkeys but harmless to humans) or was it Ebola, an extremely deadly tropical virus that had devasted villages in Zaire and the Sudan in 1976? Writing in a breathless novelistic style, Preston (American Steel, LJ 4/15/91) follows a military SWAT team as they don biohazard space suits to enter the "hot zone" and contain the alien virus. While this is thrilling reading (there are plenty of gruesome descriptions of Ebola's effects on human victims), one does wonder how much Preston sensationalized events for the sake of a good story. He also only sketchily discusses the possiblity that the destruction of the rainforests are releasing unknown viruses into the human population. Still, with a forthcoming movie starring Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, there will be demand. Buy multiple copies.
--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
One of the nation's more famous planned communities, Reston, Virginia, stands at the epicenter of this whirlwind tale of potential biological disaster. Preston, award-winning author of First Light (1987) and American Steel (1991), wrote a 1992 New Yorker article on the recognition and containment of a devastating tropical filovirus at a monkey house--the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit--operated by a division of Corning, Inc., about 10 miles from Washington, D.C. Preston expands on that article by describing his 1993 journey to Kitum Cave on Mount Elgon near the edge of the Rift Valley in Kenya, the place scientists believe is the source of all four identified filoviruses: the Marburg, the Sudan, the Zaire, and the Reston strains of Ebola. The Hot Zone is a compelling "science fact" thriller: filoviruses kill most of their monkey and human hosts in vividly gruesome ways. The process through which the U.S. Veterinary Corps at Frederick, Maryland, spotted Ebola at Reston and recruited a secret SWAT team to contain it is tense and terrifying; and Preston, who lived in Kenya for part of his youth, places this chilling incident in a broad global context, eloquently arguing that "the emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents [may be] a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere." Expect reader interest: Random House plans heavy promotion; Robert Redford and Jodie Foster are working on a motion picture based on Preston's article; and Dustin Hoffman stars in a second film on this frightening subject. Mary Carroll
From Kirkus Reviews
A bone-chilling account of a close encounter with a lethal virus, by New Yorker writer Preston (American Steel, 1991). The African rain forests from which HIV emerged are home to other viruses that make AIDS seem like child's play. Preston opens with a disturbingly graphic description of the meltdown of a human body invaded by a filovirus. Essentially, the body liquefies, spilling out billions of copies of the deadly virus, which can trigger an explosive chain of lethal transmission. Only micro-outbreaks have occurred so far, but the potential exists for worldwide catastrophe. In the fall of 1989, a monkey- importing company with a primate quarantine unit in Reston, Va. (about ten miles from Washington, D.C.), noted that its monkeys were dying off at an alarming rate and with suspicious symptoms. When the cause was found to be Ebola, a particularly deadly filovirus, all hell broke loose. The US Army quickly took over, and a SWAT team was sent in to halt the spread of the virus. The complicated and hazardous job required the donning of biological space suits, entering the monkey house (the ``hot zone''), killing each monkey, and retrieving tissue samples. A major portion of the book is about this operation, which had to be conducted in secret, since public awareness could easily have meant widespread panic. Preston is adept at telling the story through the voices of the participants, who become very real (he employs pseudonyms only twice). That the virus, now known as Ebola Reston, turned out not to affect humans is small comfort: Viruses mutate rapidly, and the rain forests are only a plane ride away. A totally convincing page turner, proving that truth is scarier than fiction. Portions of this biomedical thriller appeared in the New Yorker in somewhat different form; it will be made into a movie starring Robert Redford and directed by Ridley Scott (Alien). (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"One of the most horrifying things I've ever read. What a remarkable piece of work."
--Stephen King
"Popular science writing at its best and the year's most infectious page-turner."
--People
"A top-drawer horror story...the best literary roller coaster of the fall."
--Newsweek
From the Paperback edition.
From the Publisher
"One of the most horrifying things I've ever read. What a remarkable piece of work."
--Stephen King"Popular science writing at its best and the year's most infectious page-turner."
--People
"A top-drawer horror story...the best literary roller coaster of the fall."
--Newsweek
From the Inside Flap
A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. "The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the
appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, "The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.
From the Back Cover
"One of the most horrifying things I've ever read. What a remarkable piece of work."
--Stephen King
"Popular science writing at its best and the year's most infectious page-turner."
--People
"A top-drawer horror story...the best literary roller coaster of the fall."
--Newsweek
About the Author
Richard Preston is the author of several books, most recentlyThe Cobra Event. He is a regular contribuot to The New Yorker. He has also won the AAAS-Westinghouse Award and the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The headache begins, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New Year’s visit to Kitum cave-January 8, 1980-Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really didn’t know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with a brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.
When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what had happened to his eyes or his face or his mind. Thinking that he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.
The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he seemed able to travel by himself. He had money; he understood he had to get to Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.
A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day æParis, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.
The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with the dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights that drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern rift valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born. They say specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy rift clouds, and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.
The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes, and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is something wrong with him, but you can’t tell exactly what is happening.
He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up. Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, have expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows: his whole head is turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the underlying bone, as if the face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance know as thevomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The smell of thevomito negrofills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag is bulging and softening threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant.
When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone “extreme amplification.” This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim’s blood may contain a hundred million particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host intoitself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it is the black vomit.
He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting upæhis bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that thewhoof Charles Monet has already died while thewhatof Charles Monet continues to live.
The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his noseæhe gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, clotless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won’t coagulate, and the towels soak through.
When a man is ill in an airline seat next to you, you may not want to embarrass him by calling attention to the problem. You say to yourself that this man will be all right. Maybe he doesn’t travel well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and people do get nosebleeds in airplanes, the air is so dry and thin. . . and you ask him, weakly, if there is anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles words you can’t understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on forever. Perhaps the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot virus have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an offer of help. They become hostile, and don’t want to be touched. They don’t want to speak.. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can’t seem to find words. They can tell you their name, but they can’t tell you the day of the week or explain what has happened to them.
From AudioFile
Move over, Stephen King--Richard Preston's got a thing or two to show you about horror! What's more, this is a true story. It's the late 1980's, and Ebola Fever, an African virus with a 90% kill rate, breaks out in a research facility in the suburbs of the nation's capital. A biohazard SWAT team from the U.S. Army must secretly decontaminate the place. Writer Preston's sensationalistic treatment of this deadly situation is echoed in McGillin's reading. McGillin's narration is clear and gripping as he delivers straightforward characterizations of the book's anti-microbial heroes. E.K.D. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone.Highlighted by 1,694 Kindle readers
