Books like Down To A Sunless Sea

I read this book when the Cold War was reaching its icy zenith, amidst new headlines about the Polish unrest of the eighties. Leonid Brezhnev’s steely glare was not to be dulled by Ronald Reagan’s unremitting resolve, while a Polish Pontiff attempted to mitigate the mess, and Lech Walensa refused to budge.It had all started for me MUCH earlier...Back around 1961, you see, Ed Sullivan had internationally aired graphic line-drawn images of Japanese civilians at ground zero of Hiroshima in 1945, on his wildly popular variety show. To this day I don’t know how he could have been so irresponsible.Kids my age all over the world watched the horrific pictures fill the TV screen. Nightmares? You betcha! 9 to 12 year old kids everywhere had ‘em.And all that summer, whenever a Canadian Argus military transport lumbered slowly across the sky, I watched warily to see if it was gonna unload the Big One on us...Sure I was dumb. Aren’t most kids that age?But somehow I know that social planners followed Freud’s lead in recognizing the value of fear in societal conditioning.One recent domino event in the present can backtrack smack dab into larger, earlier dominoes from the past (traumatic events in our minds) quite easily...Well, THAT’s my own Big Bang theory, anyway.But by the mid-eighties, as the contemporaneous flick LA Cop had it, the heat was on.So when I hoped against hope by reading this vapid thriller, it’s for sure that like Dr. Strangelove, I was trying to stop worrying and LOVE the bomb. Except it didn’t work. And couldn’t.You can’t love something which scares you to death.And when I got to the inexorable end, I was a bit disgusted with myself for even starting it.Cause - quite simply - there‘s Nothing good that can come from a story (or a weapon) that ends by killing off everyone and everything you have ever LOVED.And Nothing whatever that’s innately, humanly valid in that foul widespread depredation through stark, unnerving Fear of that most basic, cherished human quality of Love that took place in the Cold War.And that blatant depredation continues, unchecked, Today.