Let the Right One In – John Ajvide Lindqvist
I put several scary books on hold in late September and hoped one or two would come in before Halloween. This one actually came through after the holiday, but that was perfect as it takes place in the week before and after Halloween, 1981. In Sweden. So it’s a little weird.
Not sure I realized when I added this to my holds that it was a vampire book. I haven’t done much of the vampire thing. And, I have to say, I did not love this one. Maybe it was the Swedishness of it. Or it was a sometimes tedious story that seemed to stretch on far too long. But most likely it was some of the brutal violence that goes along with the genre. It was a little much at times. Plus vampire stories all seem kind of the same to me. I guess I should have read the synopsis closer before adding this to my list.
Nuclear War: A Scenario – Annie Jacobsen
This was flat-out the scariest book I read last month. That was totally random, as I had placed a hold on this in late August and it finally came in during the spookiest month of the year.
It is exactly what its title suggests: Jacobsen lays out, minute-by-minute and sometimes second-by-second, the course of events over a roughly 90-minute stretch after a nuclear missile is launched at the US. How the launch is detected, how the missile flies, what the procedures are within the US government, how a response is chosen and approved, the result of the first detonation, and how other countries get pulled into the event, turning a single-missile attack into global nuclear war that basically ends civilization as we know it.
The first half of the book reads like a novel. You can’t help but race through pages, thinking something will avert the inevitable end. As Jacobsen shifts into laying out what happens after the bombs start exploding, it’s a decidedly less thrilling read.
Our generation grew up with nuclear war hanging over our heads. For 30 years we’ve thought that fear had largely passed. With more countries gaining access to nuclear weapons and some of the countries who already possess them being led by less mentally stable people, that threat is far closer than we think. As this book points out, a single rogue missile is all it could take to send us down a path we can’t turn back from.