There are some pretty bad things that can happen in the real world (Exhibit A), but that doesn’t stop authors out there from coming up with some really unfortunate circumstances that can affect humankind (see “Literature, Dystopia” or anything H.P. Lovecraft wrote). But today, let’s take a look specifically at diseases–the sicknesses that would be too terrible to comprehend if they actually existed. Here are 5 of our favorites.
1. “The Bug” from Black Hole by Charles Burns
Black Hole is Charles Burns’s twelve-part comic series, published in collected form in 2005, and it’s probably the most effective safe sex/abstinence tool this side of those Gonorrhea pictures that your Health teacher made you look at in middle school.
“The Bug,” aka “the teen plague,” starts its noxious little frolic through Seattle’s sexually active teen population. What basically follows is the infected person mutates in all kinds of horrible ways. Tentacles appear, things get under the skin and mouths show up where they shouldn’t. The end result is a whole lot more playmates for Gregor Samsa.
2. “Brainpox” from The Cobra Event by Richard Preston
Bill Clinton praised (and supposedly looked into funding bioterror research because of the book) Preston’s 1998 thriller about a virus cocktail that’s one part common cold and one part smallpox. Named “brainpox,” the disease is transmitted through the air. It sometimes blisters your nose or mouth before moving into your central nervous system and replicating in your brain by attaching itself to your eyelids and olfactory nerves. In the brain, brainpox forms crystals of itself in your cells. And right about then, things get really bad because you start eating yourself. This is because the virus wreaks havoc on your brain stem, the center for your emotion, and damages the HGPRT enzyme which, according to the book, is what stops you from self-injury or, in worse cases, snacking on your fingers.
3. “Captain Trips” from The Stand by Stephen King
At the center of Stephen King’s tome is the fictional virus “Captain Trips,” also known as: superflu, the rales, Tube Neck, Project Blue and A-Prime. 99.4% of the world’s population is susceptible to the disease, which rapidly adapts before the immune system can mount a defense. If you happen to catch Captain Trips, the path you take may vary slightly (you may experience variations in blood pressure, sneezing and/or coughing, delirium, extensive swelling), but the destination has very little deviation: you’ll be unable to breathe and X’s will appear on your eyes.
4. That Horrible Shape-Shifting Alien Transformation Thing from Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell
If Campbell’s novella doesn’t immediately ring a bell, it’s because John Carpenter’s The Thing, an adaptation of the book, is far better known. Who Goes There? inspired both The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982), and will again see another reincarnation in 2011 with the prequel film, also titled The Thing.
Taking place on a research base in Antarctica, the story begins with the base’s scientists discovering an alien spaceship and finding within its hull an alien pilot. Being scientists, they’re more concerned with the potential of this discovery than their own well being, and what happens next is the alien starts killing them one by one and assuming their shape to hide among them. Campbell’s story isn’t so much a disease as a horrible fate: an alien devours you, steals your memories and your body, and then, when found out, looks something like this:
The Thing sullies any hope of you being remembered fondly. It’s like the complete opposite of a really moving eulogy.
5. “Red Death” from “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s 1842 story begins with a swanky party thrown by Prince Prospero up in his castle, which is fortified against the plague known as Red Death that’s wreaking havoc on the land outside the castle walls. The party is going well until a mysterious figure gets into the party and unleashes the disease, which is unfortunate because it causes victims to profusely bleed out of their pores. “The Masque of the Red Death” is something like a forefather for popularizing widespread disease in fiction. People have argued that Red Death is inspired by everything from tuberculosis to cholera to the Bubonic plague.
What great diseases from books have we missed? Extra points for gruesomeness!
Tags: edgar allan poe, Fun Stuff, stephen king
The Angel-T virus (is that right?) from Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan world.
The unnamed disease from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Spawns both zombies and vampires not to mention too many books and movies to count. Spoiler Alert humanity loses!!!!
Whatever caused the end of the world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road… although I suppose that was more likely a nuclear apocalypse.
In “The Devil’s Alphabet” Daryl Gregory depicts a strange disease of unknown origin that mutates people into three very different strains: the large white unfertile Argos, the burgundy and unreadable betas which are mostly females, and the fat, musclebound Charlies, which are addicted to an elixir exuded by their elders
That’s really scary, let’s hope that fictional cures will also be a part of reality.
How about a disease that turns humans into vampires? Justin Cronin’s The Passage tell that story and it’s pretty scary.
Zombies are a product of disease in a variety of sources, such as 28 Days Later & Resident Evil.
There is “Twonk’s Disease” made famous in science fiction fandom, which can best be described as “fallen armpits”…
The “unnamed” disease that forces the protagonist to keep walking, walking, walking until he collapses in Joshua Ferris’ THE UNNAMED.
The horrible disease with little heads popping out of your skin (short story set in Africa, don’t remember author or title!) Kellis-Amberlee virus from Feed by Mira Grant – can spontaneously convert and turns any mammal over 40 pounds into a zombie.
That story is “It Will Grow On You,” by Donald Wandrei. It was published in Esquire in 1942, and anthologized several times, including The Macabre Reader, 1959 Ace Books edited by Donald A. Wollheim.
The one wherein a hard carapace grows around your face in Robert McCammon’s “Swan Song.”
And the T-4 Angel virus from Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan series….
Don’t forget the cause-your-blood-to-clot disease from space in Michael Crichton’s classic Andromeda Strain.