Jenbebookish's Reviews > The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story

Wooeeeee!! This was everything I wanted it to be and more!!!!
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I have a bit of a morbid curiosity/fascination with epidemiology & viruses, specifically the real bastards of the bunch. You know, your basic Ebola, Marburg, Small Pox, Bubonic Plague, HIV. Even just our run of the mill Influenza is fascinating, so seemingly innocuous, yet it continues to spread, multiply, & mutate year after year after year after year after year, slyly evolving & artfully dodging the lethal clutches of any and all vaccines, evading triviality & obscurity like the seasoned pro that it is, stealing away with our babies and our grandparents like a thief in the night, knocking even the strongest of us down with a sniper's precision—a fingertip on a button, a chance passing & an exhaled droplet lingering in the air. A door, a grocery cart, a sniffle, an itch, a fleck of dust in our eye. What chance do us clumsy, messy, grubby, grabby humans have against an enemy like that? Nature had always been and will always be—our most lethal adversary.
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I find it fascinating, but in the creepiest, freakiest most terrifying way possible bc of all the ways that humans might be eradicated or killed off, a superbug seems the most inevitable—all it would take is a mutation. Something these sly fuckers already do all the time!! (That, or some Skynet type sh*t💻) In the words of the late, great, George Carlan, “Everyone is always like,’The planet, the planet! We gotta save the planet!,’ Pfff, the planet will be fine! It’s US that should be worried! The planet is gonna shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”🪳🪳

Reading about this stuff is like a horror movie that I know is going to haunt my dreams but yet I can’t turn it off. It’s such a beauteous example of how diabolically perfect nature can be that it borders on the sublime. Everything about these lil buggers intrigues me.
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So naturally, when I happened upon a Richard Preston book called “The Demon in the Freezer,” I just had to pick it up, having loved his other book “The Hot Zone” with such terrified zeal! (‘The Hot Zone’ was about the origins and initial outbreak of the Ebola virus) so of course I grabbed it and it immediately shot to the top of my TBR without even knowing what it was really about.
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That demon from the title that was in the freezer was none other than an evil lil buggy we know as SMALLPOX! 🦠🦠🦠 This gets into all kinds of interesting stuff, our efforts to locate it, track it, eradicate it, all the various strains, the uncooperative countries like Russia (of course) that refuse to abide by the agreement to eliminate the virus all together, including any & all extra samples that have the potential to be stolen, moved, accidentally exposed to, accidentally spread etc etc.
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I absolutely drank this up.
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All this info surely led me to the belief that smallpox could very well still be out there, a lil demon in a lil freezer somewhere, waiting to unleash itself upon the world! Talk about freaky! It’s downright spine-chilling. To see so clearly the soft white underbelly of the human species. Us complex, trifling, smug humans that operate under the illusion that the world & its creatures submit to us. What arrogance! What folly.
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Tick tock ⏳
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TW: Animal suffering & Animal Deaths.
(view spoiler)[I do have to warn the animal lovers, that there were a few parts in this that broke my heart into a million pieces and had me SOBBING. Like I kid you not, sobbing. It made for some absolutely brutal reading, & people extra sensitive to reading about God/nature’s most beautiful creatures suffering at our hands, you might want to skip this because the parts with the monkeys just ripped my heart out and made me sick to my stomach. I’m sure most can guess where this goes and why. I tried to retell these parts to my boyfriend a day or 2 after finishing it, & I could barely choke out the words, & he had to stop me bc he didn’t want to hear it.

So yeah, it’s like that. It’s that bad.

But even amidst the tears and the pain in my heart, I was glad that it was in the book. It’s a totally horrific part of epidemiology & medical research that demands to be laid bare & spoken about, lest we forget about all the animals that have given their one, sweet, innocent, little lives to ensure that we don’t have to suffer needlessly. (No, let’s just make the animals suffer, after all they’re ours to abuse and do with what we want right?! Smh 🤦🏻‍♀️) It’s horrifying, & sickening, & I’d challenge even the most callous among us to read these parts and not feel a lump in your throat. But regardless of the awful subject matter, I really thought that it was a job well done in terms of being brutally honest about the darkest parts of medical research, while also accurately conveying the mental struggle some of these doctors & scientists go thru in order to do what they do, conveying them with sympathy & grace but without letting them off the hook. I hate to admit it, but I was glad to read of their emotional & mental struggles, I was glad to know that some of them at least go thru pain & heartache & attacks of conscience, that they are often burdened by the weight of their own guilt, bc I really couldn’t bear the thought that we had managed to evade paying a price for how we have treated nature’s most innocent & helpless of creatures. (hide spoiler)]
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Other than that tho this was 🤌🏽 muah, chef’s kiss 💋
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Gimme all the books about germs! If anyone has any recommendations for any more of this kind of stuff, please let me know!