Storm of Hate

There are some books you read that should be left just as you found them -- words on a printed page or maybe floating across an electronic screen. Then there are those whose words and characters leap off the page and beg to play the big screen. Storm of Hate is one of those. Written by a journalist who churns out hundreds, if not thousands of words a day on business matters, Storm of Hate is the big screen production reduced to the written page, the tale of characters thrown together by happenstance and the worst natural catastrophe in the history of the United States, Hurricane Katrina.

Author Jeffrey Todd was in Canada when the storm by which all other Cat 5 hurricanes will forever be measured slammed into the Louisiana coast, knocking over houses and buildings and boats and light poles like feathers flying in a breeze and destroying life as it was once known. In New Orleans his characters gather, their dreams, faults, foibles, even their blisters exposed and revealed in glaring detail. Nate and Janna, an interracial couple living in the Lower 9th Ward, each with their own pasts, miseries and mini-dramas, are trapped inside the apartment where only minutes before they were talking about childbirth. They scramble from one floor to the next as the water rises, a symbolic introduction of life's struggles to overcome obstacles. One survives, wanders, painting a picture of the destruction of a city as that character ends up in the Superdome where throngs gather, listening to voices of authority promising that buses will come, relief will be on the way. Inside the Superdome, hours pass, then days.

Food runs out. Shouts of anger mingle with moans as the sick and injured are too slowly cared for and the detritus of human life spills over in overloaded facilities that no longer have the capacity to behave. Back at the city's finest hotel, a father awaits the arrival of his estranged daughter, due in that evening, never knowing whether she has made it to the city or whether she heard the warnings and stayed away, safe. His flaws, for decades hidden beneath a cloak of success and Armani suits, are bared for all the world to see. Back at the Superdome, an elderly woman lays dying until two people with strength they did not know they possessed bring her to the brink of wanting to live. Babies cry, not understanding. And the steam builds.

As the crowd inside the sweltering Superdome grows more impatient and frustrated, SWAT team officers try to cope, barely able to contain the discontent, resorting to piling up more and more cars as boundaries. But the riots are about to erupt and the officers, like all the other characters whose insides show as if they had no clothing, are stretched to the limit of human potential.

Despite his physical distance from the scene of the storm, Todd brilliantly captures the essence of the anguish, a feat he says he was able to accomplish by interviewing several survivors who shared their stories. Maybe he should have asked them if they wanted to star in a movie.

Storm of Hate

Author Jeff Todd

Publisher: The Key Publishing House

Available on amazon.com