How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters
Andrew Shaffer
Three Rivers Press
Fiction, Humor/Media Tie-In
Themes: Altered DNA, Apocalypse, Cryptids, Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, Ghosts and Spirits, Myth-Based Stories, Plagues, Vampires and the Undead, Water Monsters, Weirdness
*****
Description
Sharknadoes, arachnoquakes, piranhacondas, beeclipses... unnatural disasters are no longer the stuff of fiction or made-for-TV disaster movies. Whether they're caused by genetic tampering, climate change, environmental damage, or ancient curses hardly matters - surviving is all that counts when it's you staring down a boaricane or outrunning a Mongolian death worm. This book gathers advice from those hardy (or foolhardy) souls who have faced unnatural dangers and lived to tell the tale... or at least died in instructive manners. Shaffer includes advice from renowned sharknado survivors Fin Shephard and April Wexler.
Review
This straight-faced companion to SyFy's slew of original monster movies (actually featured in a cameo during Sharknado 2) offers hilarious survival advice for those of us trapped in a world gone mad. Monsters and disasters are rated based on probability of occurance, danger level, and a special Fin Shephard "WTF" scale of weirdness, not to mention a handy guide to those most at risk from any given incident. I haven't seen most of these wonders, but I've seen enough B-grade monster flicks to laugh right along. (I can't deny that a small part of me still weeps to see how the former SciFi Channel has fallen from a station dedicated to sense-of-wonder science fiction and fantasy to a schlock film factory and WWE outlet.) For being just what it claimed to be, and for inducing many laugh-out-loud moments, I'm giving this light, fast read a top rating. No, it's not deep, hard science, but it doesn't claim to be. (And, judging from sharktopuses, pteracudas, and robocrocs, all created by scientists meddling in things they couldn't ultimately control, maybe hard science is overrated, anyway...)