TWISTER by David Hagberg

It's about time we kicked our DISASTERTHON into overdrive, and who better than master of disaster David Hagberg? Hagberg is back with a vengeance as he drops us into the roiling maelstrom of a small town blown apart by the TWISTER!

Hagberg deftly balances cutting edge weather forecasting and creeping disaster dread with the pungent small town milieu of Cambridge, WI. As the "hook" lines on the screen start to multiply, meteorologist Peter Geiger is faced with the nail biting decision: call a tornado warning? A false alarm could be devastating to Geiger's career, but if he hesitates ...

True to Hagberg's style, Geiger's conflict isn't easy, black and white genre grist. It'd be simple to cast Geiger as the villain of the piece, or a bumbling fool, but instead we're right there with him as he tries to thread a dangerous needle. Given the book's title we know how it's going to shake out but Hagberg's skill, as with all the best disaster stories, is in the unwinding of the inevitable.

The people of Cambridge are a motley lot: families and loners, Plain Folk and freakazoids, the doomed and the damned and the just plain unlucky. Hagberg structures the story into chapters named for each character, as paths cross and fates divert over the course of the big blowdown. It's a juicy cast just like in Hagberg's Blizzard, and everyone is drawn with Hagberg's typical skill and sensitivity. They feel like real people, thrown into an unbelievable horror. Hagberg dedicates his story to the people of Xenia, OH, who experienced a real life tornado disaster in 1974 that left 33 dead and 1,150 injured.

Smoke break! Poor Julia could sure use one right about now ...

Dell reuses the same back page ads from Barney Cohen's Coliseum, giving us a real snapshot of the zeitgeist.

Hagberg's Twister earns 4/4 for some sublimely satisfying drama and marks the highpoint of our DISASTERTHON thus far. Get twisted!

Dell Publishing, 1975