Certain diseases, for instance, cause victims to hurt themselves. But in crafting his story, Preston sails to the outer limits of biological and medical truth. Nothing beats dramatic effect like a vivid description of a pathologist slicing open his own skull. There lies what disturbs me. The Cobra Event is effective because it is scary.
Fear motivates people like nothing else can.
It makes people run away, change careers, seek God, meet deadlines at work. Novelists and screenwriters know that a reader or viewer will gasp in horror and cover his eyes when the ghost pops out of the closet, but will always return to the story for another hit of terror. I asked D.A. Henderson whether he wants to scare people to alert them to the threat of biological terrorism. No, he said. He simply wants people to recognize the need for medical and public health professionals to be prepared for that eventuality.