i read the books that 'predicted coronavirus' so you don't have to

so I think we can all agree that this year has been a hot mess like objectively 2020 sucks if the years were a TV show then 2020 definitely has like series finale kind of energy although possibly still better than the end of Game of Thrones but imagine if you could have predicted this whole thing I mean not gonna lie that would have been handy like a couple of months ago well I was looking for some new books to read during this time where we're stuck in isolation and I stumbled upon these two books now these books are the eyes of darkness by Dean Koontz and lockdown by Peter May now what these books have in common is that they claim to have predicted the corona virus pandemic and so when I came across these on line I thought no way surely that's just a marketing ploy how would anyone fall for that there's no way that these books could predict coronavirus and then all of a sudden they were in my cart and I've bought them because I'm curious I'm curious to see how these books could possibly have predicted the pandemic and also how accurately they actually predicted how it would play out so welcome welcome to the video over the next couple of days I am going to be reading these books and sharing what I find and whether they did actually predict the coronavirus let's go on tonight's program ladies and gentlemen we have something that's gonna make you sick [Music] so these books have very different origins so the eyes of darkness actually went to number one back in let's have a look okay so it was originally published in 1982 but it has this little sticker on it which says did this thriller predict the corona virus outbreak and I have to say I have just noticed that that is a quote by The Daily Mail so already not really trusting that not gonna lie so the blurb says Tina Evans can think of no better time for a fresh start it's been a year of unbelievable heartache since her son Danny's death now the Vegas show that she is directed is about to premiere so she balanced to put her grief behind her I have to say that doesn't actually mention a pandemic only there is a message for Tina scrawled on the chalkboard in Danny's room two words that will send Tina a terrifying journey not dead so where does the like coronavirus happen I also noticed that on the inside cover some of the reviews are just from people on Amazon so I have to say I'm skeptical now the second book is literally called lockdown and the story behind this book is that it was originally written in 2005 but it was rejected by PETA Maeve's publishers at the time and apparently one of Pete's amazed readers messaged him and said hey you should write a book about the pandemic in the interview that I read he basically said that he thought about it for a minute and then he was like hang on a minute I have written a book about the pandemic so he found the manuscripts they he'd obviously ditched when the book was rejected originally and now here it is so let's have a little read of the blurb London the epicenter of a global pandemic it's a city in lockdown violence and civil disorder simmer martial law has been imposed I'm not 100% sure what the military are gonna do about a pandemic like what are you gonna do try to shoot it a deadly virus has already claimed thousands of victims health and emergency services are overwhelmed this sounds more promising like this sounds like it's actually about a kind of more similar situation to what we are currently in a murdered child because of course there is a powerful conspiracy di Jack McNeil does a classic thriller character name isn't it I feel like there's like a thriller protagonist random name generator and they just pick out of a selection of like five sinister forces are tracking his every move prepared to kill again to conceal the truth which will stop him first the virus all the killers I assume this is referring to like a murderer as opposed to the killers who sing mr. Brightside so that sounds more convincing so I'm gonna read the other one first because I'm more intrigued about this okay so I've just sat here and powered through to page 50 the good news is that it's kind of okay and relatively easy to read the bad news well is it bad news the bad news for the sake of this video is that no coronavirus has been mentioned yet in fact no disease or illness at all has been mentioned yet so kind of wondering when Mystic Meg over here is gonna start predicting things but what I can say for now is that it hasn't happened yet update I am a hundred pages in and I'm still no closer to any mention of a pandemic I honestly think that my horoscope would have done a better job at predicting this so far my 150 page updates is that surprise surprise no mention of a pandemic honestly it's getting a bit laborious now I'm kind of bored of it okay so this isn't ideal because I'm only a hundred and eighty pages into this book but I kind of hate it like the way it's written is just so cliche and stereotypical they totally on ironically say let's blow this joint like basically one of the bad guys disguises himself as someone who works for a gas company and is trying to protect the neighborhood against a gas leak but he's actually doing is exploding her house now when her house literally explodes no one in the neighborhood cares like no one gives a flying [ __ ] like don't you think her neighbors might have noticed that the house next door to them had exploded don't you think that maybe a house exploding might end up in the news this lady freaking Tina is the director of a huge Las Vegas show and you are telling me that no one cares that her house just exploded also at this point no one actually knows if she's alive and for some reason no one cares there's also been absolutely no mention of a Korean virus at this point and we're beyond the halfway point so I'm actually gonna give up on this for today because it's it's just annoying me hello good morning the dialogue between characters is so cringeworthy it's like one of them will say please try and get us out of this situation and the other one is like I'm not just gonna try and I just think stop that however I have made it to page 232 and on page 229 we have our first reference to diseases the general vibe is that they are working in a lab where they are developing biological warfare so that basically means when you use things like diseases and viruses to your advantage in war basically with the intent of infecting the enemy however this book is clearly written in the Cold War period and it kind of just blames the East for everything so it says he didn't have any choice but to commit the installation to it once we found out that damned Chinese were deeply into it and the Russians giving them a hand to earn some foreign currency on new friends the Russians what a joke welcome to the new Cold War it's China's nasty little project remember all we're doing is just playing catch-up if you have to blame someone because you're feeling guilty about what we're doing here then blame the Chinese not me so that doesn't really sit right with me it seems to be blaming nations that at the time were communists like the Soviet Union and China for biological warfare now I'm pretty sure at this time there had been treaties or pact signed to forbid the use of biological warfare but it is worth noting that the first instances ever of biological warfare won by Russia or China it was by Britain the British Army used smallpox against Native Americans as well as aboriginals in Australia this seems to me kind of like cold war propaganda where they're just like blame the Communists for everything but then it does go on to say this but sometimes I wonder while we're working so hard to keep ahead of our enemies are we perhaps becoming more like them I'll be becoming a totalitarian state the very thing we made the spies so there's definitely an awareness of being a little bit hypocritical and contradictory but it always links back to being as bad as a certain enemy so you know I was saying it was cringy before well it got worse the worst bit so far has been when they basically break into a lot of people working in the lab obviously like who are you and this Tina walks in and is like justice baby it's just too much I just can't take stuff like that seriously also bit of a rogue change in plot suddenly the kid who they thought was dead is psychic and no one's questioning it and Tina's only way of rationalizing all the weird [ __ ] that's going on is oh my son must not be dead and he must be psychic no one even bats an eyelid everyone's like yeah the dead kid must be alive and psychic the best thing is that I only have 50 pages to go okay so I'm done basically it was that classic trope of using the child as the symbol of purity and innocence in binary opposition to an oppressive destructive regime so basically they infect the kid with the virus he doesn't die they're like what the hell this is supposed to kill people so then they keep inviting him he keeps surviving and somehow that just makes him psychic I don't really know so then the fragility and innocence of childhood is kind of juxtaposed with the big white sterile Factory and prison cell and all these like medical supplies and basically it's just about how evil and corrupt biological warfare is now the reason that people suggest that this book predicted coronavirus is because the disease that they develop is called ruin 400 which I will give it to Dean Koontz like that is a pretty wild coincidence the key weren't there being coincidence I did some research and originally the disease was called Gorky 400 named after a viral EG lab in russia basically to blame the Russians after the Soviet Union disbanded this book was edited and they changed it to one 400 to make the new enemy the Chinese instead of the Russians so it says they called the staff will hunt 400 because it was developed at the our DNA lab outside of the city of Wuhan now this does actually exist that is a viral G lab in Wuhan Wuhan 400 is a perfect weapon it afflicts only human beings no other living creatures can carry it and like syphilis whoo hun 400 can't survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute we hunt for hundreds kill rates is 100 percent no one is supposed to survive the Chinese tested it on God knows how many political prisoners they were never able to find antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against it the virus migrates to the brain stem and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth it destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body's autonomic functions the victim simply ceases to have a pulse functioning organs any urge to breathe so even though it's called we've had four hundred it isn't actually that similar to coronavirus the only two things they actually have in common is that they originated in Wuhan and they are a virus but I'm sure the flat earthers are going absolutely nuts of this my final kind of analysis of that is that it's just cold war xenophobic propaganda Dean Koontz originally blamed Russia but it was then republished and re-edited to blame China as the new enemy it's not totally arbitrary and random that Wuhan was the place that he specified because there is a viral adji in Wuhan but if people use this book as evidence that coronavirus is a man-made disease then I'm sorry that is just so freakin stupid yeah aside from that that disease allegedly has nothing in common with covert 19 and that is that on that where is my copy of lockdown I started oh my god the camera is on top of it damn it so now that we've dismissed the eyes of darkness as just weird anti-china conspiracy theory we can get rid of that terrible book and move on to lockdown by Peter May will this book be any better Peter maybe I'll let you know okay I have literally spent this whole day just reading this one book this one book and it's okay but like I can see why it was rejected by publishers in the first place there's a lot of plot holes and usually they are to do with the pandemic maybe the cooler if I had that light on oh it does oh man I can't be bothered to refill my entry I will praise this book however because it mentions the pandemic on page 2 page 2 in the eyes of darkness I have to wait until page like 300 to get even a mention of a disease somehow that was still quicker than Boris Johnson's response to the corona virus but let's not get into that lockdown however is the Tom Daley of pandemic works because it just just dives right in you can have that one for free and that's kind of where my praise for this book ends basically in the early pages it talks about how terrible and awful this virus is so when people go out in public they are wearing face masks that does happen now however it's so bad that cigarettes were smoked through the fine fibers of the masks leaving round nicotine stained patches and a brazier was kept burning for the cigarette ends infection was to easily spread so infection in this world is so bad and that people who still want to smoke smoke through the masks also newspapers aren't even being printed because the disease is so contagious so it says newsprint handled by an infected person would pass the disease on to another reader once the virus was on your hands it could pass into your system by food or even by rubbing your eyes news was only disseminated now by radio television and the Internet it also mentions how hotels are closed and there are no flights going in from Gatwick or Heathrow all of that being said all of the characters in this book literally walk around like there's no issue so it is about the police and forensic scientists but they are just completely for some reason above this disease they meet up they have sex there's no mention of staying like two meters apart anything like that apparently the rules just don't apply it's people with authority hmm that kind of sounds familiar four five hundred thousand six or more have died from this disease and yet the police are just walking around like it's nothing members of the police do have access to a cure for the virus called a flu kill very imaginative but surely if that was in such short supply that only the police could have it the police should really be social distancing or at least making some effort not to have to use it it mentions the curfew but other than that there are absolutely no restrictions on people's movement at all obviously I do have to recognize that Peter May wrote this whilst lockdown was still a figment of fiction and I guess Sandra and Phil queuing outside Tesco two metres apart to do their weekly shop isn't that interesting for a thriller book but still if you're gonna construct this world where there's a pandemic and London is in lockdown surely you would consider that you can't just roam around the city like it doesn't matter especially because they find the body on a building site which means that the people who are doing the construction work are still working plus at one point he goes into a bar and every person that he comes into contact with he makes absolutely no effort to avoid a infecting or B being infected by it also suggests that it's just being contained within London but still five hundred thousand people have died so surely if it was that contagious and that many people who died maybe you'd start taking precautions di Jack McNeil's son literally dies from this and he just carries on with his job okay sorry my camera actually died because I've been ranting for so long about this book basically to cut long story short this again writes about a pandemic as a kind of manmade biological weapon I guess it kind of just shows how we were all kind of complacent in thinking that would be totally indestructible when it came to a new virus and this pandemic has proven were actually not I gave this one like a two stars out of five and I've maybe no this one's probably a two as well but like this is one point eight rounding up and this is two point two rounding down you know what I mean basically my final conclusion is that the eyes of darkness is pretty much just propaganda also it didn't predict coronavirus it happened to imagine a virus which is nothing like covert 19 but they did happen to call it Wuhan 400 lockdown somehow has even more inconsistencies and does imagine a scenario which is significantly more similar to the predicament we're currently in but given what we know now about what a pandemic is actually like it literally has no value I've already harsh and mean saying that but like it really isn't that worth the read I'm sorry ultimately this was kind of just a waste of my time and money do I regret it maybe but what's done is done you know I should add as well these are obviously just my opinions if one of these books does interest you and it sounds off your street then absolutely go for it and enjoy them this is a vegetarian channel because we don't want no beef I just think they are using the fact that they supposedly predicted the pandemic and capitalizing on that to drive sales and to be honest that's kind of a tenuous claim so there you go I hope you enjoyed this video don't forget that for your lockdown reading it is really really important to support local independent bookstores if you would like to preorder my book the universe then you can thank you very very much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it have a wonderful day and I will see you next time buh-bye [Music] in case I don't see ya good afternoon good evening and good night

Channel: Jack Edwards

Views: 181,327

Rating: 4.950016 out of 5

Keywords: the eyes of darkness, lockdown, dean koontz, predicted coronavirus, conspiracy theory, conspiracy, covid-19, predicted, wuhan-400, wuhan, peter may, predicted lockdown, pandemic, predicted pandemic, pandemic books, book review, review, reading youtuber, booktube, jack edwards

Id: zyngH6dLrRc

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020