Nevermind

I spoke too soon about there not being enough specifics about the survivors having to eat their dead friends in Alive.

It's a short graph, but the desciption is so gruesome that when I read it I had to cover my mouth to gag and put the book down. The survivors, desperate for "new tastes" and tired of their normal fare of human muscle, decide to go ahead and try the small intestines, brains and lungs of the dead. The brains, when putrid, are apparently far worse to eat then rotting muscle, say. Eventually they start to make something of a human/snow stew by cutting up each into small pieces, mixing it with melted snow and serving it in "bowls" made from the cracked skulls of the dead.

What really made me gag, though, was reading about the survivors cracking open the bones and then sucking out the bone marrow. You'd have to really be tired of lungs to do that, eh?

Another interesting point: The survivors also eat the hearts of their friends, including the blood clots that surrounded nearly all of their hearts. Now, most of the people on this trip were young, ages 20 to 40. A few were older, but most were around 20. So how did these young people, who end up getting killed in the crash and then eaten, end up with blood clots already surrounding their hearts at such a young age? Trauma from the crash? The milk/dairy/cow diet of Uruguay? Do people normally just have blood clots floating around their hearts like that?

Hmmm.

Anyway, I finished Alive. The writing, piss poor. But the story is pretty good. I think I'm moving on to Cash by Johnny Cash next. (Rob Gordon's favorite book.) The movie is out and I'm ready to take a break from snow-disaster survivor books for a while. Although... Aron Ralston's Between A Rock and a Hard Place has been eyeing me from the bookshelf. Poor Aron, he's forced to cut off his own arm and still I make him wait.