From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of lossA city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.The fireman is coming. Stay cool.No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen.

Koontz-Alert Checklist (Every Dean Koontz book has at least one of the following things.)1. Blond lead/love interest - Nope2. Dog(s) - Yup (thanks Delee!!!)3. Government conspiracy - Yup4. Aliens - Yup (in the afterword)5. Serial or trained Killer - Yup6. Bougainvillea plant - Yup7. Sodium-vapor streetlight - Kinda (mercury-vapor)8. Precocious child - Nope9. Town gone crazy - Nope10. Psychic(s) - YupSeven outta ten but I must note that the structure of this novel is the blueprint for so many of Koontz's books that I lost count while researching. One of these days I will sit down and create a list of his books that follow this structure, but for now I'll just say, at least half of his published work follows this formula.The Eyes of Darkness, whose title makes zero sense in context, was originally published under Koontz's pseudonym Leigh Nichols. In the late 90s, Koontzy-boy took some time off rewriting the same Koontz story over and over again to rewrite some of his pen names' books over and over again. Those books include: Shadowfires, The Key to Midnight, The House of Thunder, The Servants of Twilight, and this one righ'chere. Why did he do such a thing? Who the fuck knows, right? Guy had too much time on his hands, I guess, because this story definitely isn't worth the extra attention. It's not even worth the paper it's printed on, paper that, I must add, smells goddamn wonderful. These old Berkley paperbacks are the best aromatic reading experience money can buy. They smell better than old TOR paperbacks. Better than those crumbly Zebra horror novels. They're just the fuckin best smelling things, yo.Anyfuck, the most glaring issue with this book is the way it depends on convenience to progress the plot. Slight spoilers ahead:Elliot Stryker, the male lead, is perfect. He's handsome, he's the best cook in the world, he can fuck, he's ex-military so he knows the inner workings of government shenanigans, he can fly, he owns his own plane, he's a marksman, he's a master at offensive/defensive driving...You get the picture. Everything Tina, the main character, needs, Elliot provides in the most unrealistic fashion. Then, at some point, when Tina and Ellliot happen to need a 4WD to get through snowy terrain, the character they're visiting, Billy, just happens to have one they can borrow. There's never really any suspense because Koontz constantly pulls rabbits out of his asshole to save these two. It gets so ridiculously repetitive and predictable that it killed all the tension for me. Of course they're going to be all right because CONVENIENCE!The ending goes nowhere. It literally wraps up on the final page. Koontz built up this trained killer only to wipe him out on the final page with zero fanfare.One moment dude's flying in to wreck Tina and Elliot's shit, the next he's crashing. hellogoodbyeThere's also one big question left unanswered. If Danny (the psychic kid, I shit you not is named Danny...there's also a man in black, but we won't go there) was so goddamn powerful and could knock a fucking helicopter out of the sky...how the fuck did these shadowy government motherfuckers keep him prisoner??? Like, why didn't he just tear the doors off the hinges and walk the fuck out? I call bullshit on this shitty fuck of a shit book. Shit!There is one funny part in the book, where Koontz names the partners of a law firm after his old pen names: Dwyer, West, Nichols, and Coffey. That bit legitimately made me laugh, so I guess this book wasn't entirely terrible...Who am I kidding, yes it was. One star it is, folks.In summation: I know you wanna scroll down to the comments and ask me "I thought you were done with Koontz, fat boy???" but I'll ask you nicely not to. My good friend Delee wanted to restart our chronological Koontz reads (rereads for me) and I wasn't about to turn her down. Even though I disliked this book, I had fun reading it with her. I always do. It's like watching a terrible movie with a friend just so you can make fun of it together. Plus, Koontz is easy to read and...why am I still explaining myself to you? Anyway, like seventy-five percent of Koontz's output, THE EYES OF DARKNESS is pretty fucking awful, but I'm sure someone will come along and tell me I don't understand his genius, or how his hairpiece has an IQ of 210. Whatever. Final Judgment: Cat urine boiling at the bottom of a dumpster fire.Next month we tackle...The Mask, which is another novel Koontz originally released under a pen name, only this time it was Owen West.

Set during the time of the first outbreak of bubonic plague in England, a young monk is tasked with learning the truth about reports of people being brought back to life, a mission that pulls him toward a village ruler who has made a dark pact with evil forces.

Pathologic 2 is an Open World Survival Horror game where you fight against a devastating plague. As the only sane medic around, save the town before it's fully...

Soon after her return from a business trip to Hong Kong, Beth Emhoff dies from what is a flu or some other type of infection. Her young son dies later the same day. Her husband Mitch however seems immune. Thus begins the spread of a deadly infection. For doctors and administrators at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, several days pass before anyone realizes the extent or gravity of this new infection. They must first identify the type of virus in question and then find a means of combating it, a process that will likely take several months. As the contagion spreads to millions of people worldwide, societal order begins to break down as people panic.

Pathologic Classic HD is an extensive remaster of the original game, featuring updated graphics and effects, while addressing the most prominent critiques of th...

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