Outbreaks and Epidemics

Starred review from May 4, 2020
Anderson (Stake) assembles a fun, nostalgia-filled anthology of 23 original, lighthearted horror tales riffing on the movie monsters of both modern cinema and B-movie favorites. The majority of tales are short and snappy, like Jonathan Maberry’s fresh, surprising zombie story “Gavin Funke’s Monster Movie Marathon” and Karina Fabian’s playful “Josie’s Last Straw,” both of which hit the ground running and pack a quick punch. Fran Wilde’s “Welcome to the Underhill Cinema,” is one of the longer offerings, taking the time to settle in to a more weird and sinister register. Linda Maye Adams’s especially delightful “Alien Pizza” features friendly aliens so enamored with low-budget monster movies that they make one of their own. Every aspect of horror movie production gets its moment in the spotlight in stories featuring tortured directors (Kevin Pettway, “Love Your Mother”), ambitious PAs (Brendan Mallory, “Make Me a Star”), washed-up creature feature screenwriters (Sam Knight’s “Whoever Writes Monsters”), and, of course, classic cinematic monsters—vampires, werewolves, kaiju, gods, demons, and zombies all make appearances and are frequently given the opportunity to be protagonists instead of villains. The authors’ palpable love of supernatural cinema is infectious; horror fans won’t want to put this down.

May 18, 2020
Health journalist Senthilingam debuts with a straightforward, helpful primer on understanding infectious disease spread and control. Beginning with terminology basics, she discusses how outbreak specialists decide to target a disease for control, elimination (as a threat), or eradication (erasing its presence in the population altogether). Senthilingam focuses on strategies for controlling spread and for quickly developing vaccines, and addresses at length the human factors that hamper these measures, including the overuse of antibiotics, which breeds antimicrobial resistance; the tendency of some patients not to complete protocols when they start to feel better; and the fear of vaccines, which in the U.S. and Europe has led to the reemergence of measles and in Pakistan and Afghanistan has interfered with the eradication of polio. Though brief references to Covid-19 appear throughout, Senthilingam concentrates on the disease’s predecessors. She covers ancient diseases still persistent in the undeveloped world, including leprosy, tuberculosis, and bubonic and pneumonic plague, and discusses zoonotic, or animal-spread, disease—insect-spread dengue, Zika, and Lyme; Ebola, thought to have been introduced to a wider population by an unknown infected animal; and influenza, transmitted by both birds and pigs. A lay audience currently mired in concern about Covid-19 but potentially uninformed about epidemics in general should find Senthilingam’s information-rich work both enlightening and accessible.