I was spooked almost immediately, even knowing it was all a bit light on fact. Preston needs only the space of a few pages to subdue the reader into a state of trepidation. The book is structured around four events: our first contact in the 1960s with Marburg virus (MARV)-a close cousin to Ebola-named for the German city in which it was discovered the earliest recorded outbreak of Ebola Zaire (EBOZ) in Sudan and DRC (formerly Zaire) in 19 outbreak of Reston virus (RESTV) in Northern Virginia and the final act sees Preston donning a biocontainment suit for a solo jaunt in a sub-Saharan cave in search of the cagey killer. In this case, thankfully, the truth isn't scarier than fiction. It might have passed for harmless over-sensationalizing, except with the Ebola epidemic in-progress and tensions wound tighter than ever, the book has become the bane of disease experts and science communicators working to tamp down the mass hysteria. There can be no doubt that Preston delivered a vivid and hair-raising thrill ride, a marvelously written if unevenly paced house of horrors, but on balance his book is about as accurate as a Stone age slide rule. To say that Preston took artistic liberties is akin to saying Ayn Rand held only a little contempt for Marxism or that Christopher Nolan's Memento had a tendency to confuse its viewers.
The subtitle for Richard Preston's 1994 bestseller reads: "The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus." How much you enjoy The Hot Zone might just hinge on what you know about Ebola going in and, by extension, how seriously you take that subtitle.
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