8/27/26
Connected via a temperamental hotspot courtesy of my phone, but the connection is slower than dial up, so we’ll see how this goes. Got one load of me and Mary’s stuff singlehandedly loaded, drove 4 and a half hours, unloaded it by myself, and nearly stepped on a baby copperhead who’d come up on the carport to see what was happening. I explained to him that my grandfather, when he lived here, would have killed him on sight. I went on to explain that I will turn 59 next month, and am trying to be a different man in my old age, and that my moral code these days is based on Buddhism in one hand and a Ruger snub nose .357 in the other, and that if he promised to head off into the forty acres of forest behind the house, I would let him live.
Which he did.
And I have to admit, despite my lifelong fear and loathing of snakes, he was sort of cute, slithering away just as fast as he could go.
So, one of the things on today’s To-Do List is to mow. Short grass around the house will discourage another visit.
Also waiting for the first of several contractors and workman today. He’s supposed to show up between 8am and noon.
~
Women In Horror Year: Day 112
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
Hardcover - Paperback - eBook - Audiobook
There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.
I’ve been reading horror fiction since the late-1970s. Earlier than that if we count comic books. I may not be the best writer in the field, but I’m damn sure one of the best read. I can recite passages from long out of print horror novels that everyone else has forgotten. Tell me you’re looking for a book about a ____ who ____ but with _____ and I can tell you what it is. Up until last week, had you asked me “What’s the scariest book ever written, Brian?” my answer would have been quite different than it is today.
Because Nuclear War: A Scenario is absolutely 100% the scariest book ever written. Already one of my consistent, must-read authors (meaning when she drops a new book, I drop everything else, including writing my own, until i’ve read it) Jacobsen kicks it into another gear with this one. It’s told in that straightforward, matter-of-fact, disarming tone she does so well, and weaves in a dizzying amount of facts and data that — in the hands of any other writer — would probably overwhelm the reader. But not here. Instead, those terrible facts and terrifying data, all exhaustively researched, reveal what we Gen Xers raised on movies like Mad Max and books like Damnation Alley and comics like Atomic Knights long suspected but were afraid to acknowledge — there is no surviving a nuclear war. No amount of prepping will do it. It doesn’t matter what kind of bunker the ricj technocrats build. They’re still screwed, if not from the initial exchange then certainly in the aftermath that follows.
After a brief history of the world’s nuclear programs, Jacobsen details a terrifying, thoroughly engrossing minute by minute account of the likely way nuclear war will unfold. The horrors she reveals make The Day After seem like a Pixar cartoon. This book will make you uncomfortable and anxious and full of dread. An utterly staggering achievement, and no surprise it hit the bestseller lists and won several major awards (although curiously, it did not win a Bram Stoker Award, which perhaps shows just how out of touch the voting membership is, because it’s a white-knuckle page-turner and scarier than anything any of us will write in our careers.
Nuclear War: A Scenario is available in hardcover, paperback, eBook and audiobook from Dutton. Read it, and then hug your loved ones for an extra long time.
