The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story
By: Richard Preston / Narrated By: Paul Boehmer
Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
Disjointed? A bit… but soooo exciting: Listened to it in a single sitting!
Which is to say that I went to bed waaaay past my bedtime. Yes, even with Paul Boehmer as narrator, he who is normally NOT a favorite of mine.
Boehmer actually does fairly well, but be prepared for several production glitches. He starts a paragraph, then he repeats the opening line. This happens SEVeral times. Then too, there are MANY cutaways of audio where it all of a sudden sounds like he was in a closet but stepped out and is now blaring the words: Press the volume down button… quick! But other than that, the man manages to carry the entirety of the book, the suspense, the cliffhangers, the close calls, the disease, the death and suffering, really well. So, yes, I’m still miffed with him for butchering Roy Blount Jr.’s ode to New Orleans, Feet on the Street, but I’ve gotta hand it to him that The Demon in the Freezer was one of those stories that kept me on the edge of my seat… er, bed, seeing as I was avoiding turning out the lights.
Okay, yup, it is indeed disjointed. It weaves together stories about the Anthrax Attacks on U.S. soil shortly after 9/11, an in-depth (And I mean in-DEPTH!!!) history of the eradication of smallpox, with arguments for and against keeping samples of smallpox, the “demon”, in freezers in Atlanta and in Siberia. The stories go EVERYwhere, with Soviet defectors, small towns hit with smallpox, postal workers ailing and some being able to suggest that perhaps they were exposed to anthrax (And others not even considering that—they were told it was NOT a factor they should concern themselves with—and dying). It specializes in the people who work at USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, showcasing a swashbuckling cowboy here, a button-down introvert there, maybe an earnest go-getter gal doing her best in between.
Plus, and this is hard, there’s a LOT on the experiments going on at USAMRIID, so if you’re tenderhearted, as I kinda sorta am, you’re likely to feel quite a bit of distress about what all happens to monkeys and to chimps. When I got to the part about trying to successfully infect monkeys with smallpox so new vaccines could be studies, and then the sole survivor, Harper, has to be euthanized? Well, I was a wreck. Believe me, as a person who can’t get the current vaccine due to a health condition, I GET IT: Another/a different vaccine would be wonderful. But jeez, the cost that other animals pay so that I might live my dithering little life is sometimes overwhelming.
But I digress…
Author Richard Preston has a wonderful ability to make everything, even old history, seem fresh, seem scintillating and exciting. His ability to create suspense is way up there with the greatest of the Thriller writers, even if it does seem like here he bit off QUITE a bit and tried to squeeeeeze it into a single book (Seriously, what do anthrax and smallpox have to do with each other? Answer: Nuthin’). But even tho’ I felt I was being popped all over the place, and even if that was mildly irritating, I was still mightily excited, not to mention terrified, by some of the things he wrote about here. Oooooh as in, say for instance, that smallpox is one manipulated gene away from being something we do NOT have a vaccine for. A Soviet scientist jaws it up at one point with another epidemiologist: They puff some ultra-fine powder into the night air, note the wind’s direction, note surrounding towns, and decide what town will be obliterated by their little bioterrorism question. It’s just a joke to them, but the fact that people think like that is unutterably horrifying.
You up for a medical thriller with lots of manipulated bioterrorism threats (And Cheney reeeeeally wanting the anthrax specimen to be like something Iraq would make), several heroes, and a multitude of sacrificial monkeys? Up for devious minds, for envelopes filled with deadly weapons-grade toxins? Up for little children who survive the last case of smallpox in the 1970s, followed by a dude just wanting a cigarette and opening up a window, setting his contagious disease to fly up through the air and infect people? Up for some people who dodge a bullet, and many more who don’t?
Then you, dear Accomplice, should give The Demon in the Freezer a try. Me? I’m going to forgive narrator Paul Boehmer his former trespasses and give ‘im a pat on the back instead.
And when all this is over, this COVID-19 Distress? Maybe I’ll be in the mood to give Preston’s The Hot Zone a go-round. Only, that is, if I’m up for missing sleep…
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