Hot Zone Literary Techniques

In the novel The Hot Zone, Richard Preston tells the graphic truth of a family of filoviruses. This family, known to be home to the deadliest viruses on the planet, can easily kill it’s host within days. Throughout the book, Preston tells how this family of filoviruses has spread across the planet, and almost overcame the human race. Each story is a person’s particular encounter with the hot virus family, and how they either died from it, or overcame it. This family is home to three viruses: Marburg, Ebola Zaire, and Ebola Sudan. Preston uses his literary techniques to create suspense in the reader. The main literary elements used are: imagery, analogy, and simile. Each technique plays an important role in the beauty of this novel.
The most powerful literary technique Preston uses is imagery. The power of this element can be shown to the reader when Ebola overcomes its host. “The black vomit blew up around the scope and out of Monet’s

The suspense-feeling can be found while he compares the virus to pepper. “...he realized that what he had thought was ‘pepper’...were really inclusion bodies” (198). Preston compares pepper to an inclusion body, or a body in the bloodstream waiting to explode with a virus. The suspense builds here, because these real people were not aware of the seriousness that this virus possesses. As the reader progresses in the novel, everything seems to be fine, with little specks of “pepper” within a blood cell. Then suddenly, the suspense builds when both the reader and Tom Geisbert, the person who finds this disease in the monkeys, realize the sample they spread was in fact a deadly filovirus. Panic then asserts itself into the reader, creating a sense of suspense and wonder. From there, the story is told, and the reader is even more captivated. Overall, the use of an analogy allows the reader to relax, then become scared as they realize the true horror beneath the