I actually don’t spend all of my time watching scary movies and scary tv shows. Sometimes I read…scary books.

This past weekend I read one of the scariest books I’ve read in, well, ever. Richard Preston’s “dark biology” opus The Demon in the Freezer. (You probably remember him as the guy who scared you senseless with The Hot Zone. I found this one even scarier).

Word of advice: don’t read about smallpox while you’re feverish.

Preston’s book is chilling because it’s not just a detached medical treatise on smallpox, nor is it a history of medicine-oriented account that stops with the erradication of smallpox in humans in nature. It’s about how perilously close we are to experiencing hell on earth at the hands of an unknown number of people with access to this efficient and highly contagious virus, and why it didn’t need to be this way.

It’s 4 years old, but still topical and still fascinating. (Unless you have some sort of underlying anxiety disorder, then you might want to skip this one).

Oh, and you might not want to read it while you’re eating.

I followed Demon in the Freezer with Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Book of the Dead, the 7th Pendergast novel (the series started with Relic). This was complete and utter coincidence, the Preston’s are brothers. (As a sidenote, Dr. Noodles used to work with Douglas Preston, bringing this whole saga around to…someplace).

Dance of Death even opens with an anthrax-terror scare, which has to be a shoutout to Demon in the Freezer. I thought that was nice. I do rather like the way that all of the Lincoln-Preston books, even the non-series, stand-alone thrillers, inhabit the same universe so that characters can pop up in different books. It took me a long time to catch on to this, they do it in a rather subtle way.

Many of my museum-y friends like these books because museum administrators and donors do stupid, stupid things and generally make their staff suffer and ultimately die violently because of their own egotism and vanity. I just find them amusing mystery/horror novels with good stories.

So we don’t drift too far from the pop-culture abyss, I’ll point out that Relic was made into a pretty good movie, which starred Penelope Ann Miller, who now plays the Senator’s annoying ex-wife (a la 24‘s Sherry Palmer) on Vanished, which is sort of the poor-man’s 24. Vanished is Not A Good Show but we watch it out of some bizarre sense of loyalty because it stars Gale Harold, who I used to go to school with. One of Harold’s co-stars on Vanished is Rebecca Gayheart, who used to be on Dead Like Me (but was replaced by Laura Harris, who, as Marie Warner, was more evil than Sherry Palmer in the second season of 24).

Originally, I was going to post about how I think “the Bicycle Thief” is, so far, my favorite episode of Dead Like Me. But then I thought, “No, I should post about a book because I never post about books anymore. No TV today. Books. That worked out well, didn’t it?