With the great quake of 2011 behind us, and everyone gearing up for Hurricane Irene, I thought I’d recommend some good disaster-related fiction for my dear readers, in the event that you want to curl up with one of these tales while you wait for impending doom to pass.
Shipwreck
Life of Pi, by Yan Martel – Pi and his family are zookeepers, who pack themselves and the animals off to sea for a new life in a new country. But soon enough, their ship sinks, stranding Pi on a small evacuation boat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and …a Bengal tiger. You can imagine the results. Or can you? Because the novel isn’t very clear cut. Was Pi really on a boat with animals? Or is the story just a child’s imaginative way of processing disaster? Deciding pretty directly correlates with your view on religion.
Hurricane
Stormy Weather, by Carl Hiassen – Set against the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, Stormy Weather is hilarious, proving once again that nothing good comes out of Florida. Featuring a fentanyl addicted ex con named Snapper who’s running an insurance scam (or set of scams, to be more accurate), and a cracked ex-Florida governor known as Skink who’s trying to make a point about the Everglades, everyone in Stormy Weather has an agenda. And there actually is a point. Haissen is sarcastic as hell, but there was a ton of profiteering going on after Andrew, and someone needed to paint the picture.
Pandemic
The Stand, by Stephen King – We all know the plot by way of either the novel itself or the now-classic TV miniseries. But decades after The Stand was published, it still stands alone as one of the best novels showing the fear and the very real potential effects of a global pandemic that kills off more than 90 percent of the population. Say what you will about a show down with the devil, but the larger point of the book is to show that people break one of two ways in a disaster – they either try to rebuild or they try to take it all down.
Nuclear attack
Swan Song by Robert McCammon – Basically The Stand, but after a nuclear explosion destroys the entire nation. No devil, per se, but there are some sadistic bastards running around, with the added disadvantage of being sick and deformed by nuclear fallout. Sad thing about this novel is that the focus is on how there is no preparation for this type of attack. Those that burrowed underground to avoid the “Big One” were subsequently entombed there. And those that weren’t have to spend their lives struggling to find basic necessities in a wasteland, competing for resources with roving, murderous gangs.
Plane crash
Lord of the Flies, by Robert Golding – Another one we all had to read in high school, but with good reason. Look around. Are we sure we’re not living in a place free of adult supervision? Because things certainly look to have gone native out my window. To this day, Lord of the Flies is a great source of debate, underscoring some fundamental political divisions in our country. Are we born bad and just have a thin layer of society standing between civility and a flash mob? Or are we made bad over time by society’s injustices?
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