Environmentalist/author Michael Tobias delivers a would-be searing sermon on ozone depletion and the fate of the planet, but things fall flat in FATAL EXPOSURE! We're off to a roaring start on an Antarctic expedition, as some scientists doing routine monitoring find a wasteland of death and suffering. As one little baby penguin shits and pukes itself to death right at the feet of Dr. Willard, we receive the message loud and clear: something is wrong! Tobias writes with a cynical but clear eyed attitude, rendering these initial horrors all the more striking.
Flash forward a few years later. That mysterious ozone phenomena has reappeared over Seattle! Once Tobias gets into the capital-P Plotting of the story, things get sticky. The horror and dread of the opening scenes are replaced with bathos and pure silliness: witness the tragic fate of a cameraman, knocked out of a helicopter, onto another helicopter, getting chopped into a thousand pieces and causing a crash, all above a rotten ocean of dead whales, fish, plankton, done in by ozone depletion! By the final 50 pages we've been reduced to stock survivalist scenarios as civilization breaks down in the PNW. It's just too much, a cavalcade of misery, stock conspiracy plotting, and wannabe Grand Guignol that leaves us feeling nothing but vague dissatisfaction.
For a strong start followed by nothing in particular, Fatal Exposure earns one UV ray warning out of four:
Dig that Art Deco cover art though.
Pocket Books, 1991
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