The primary symptoms are fever, coughing, and shortness of breath. It destroys the part of the brain that controls all of the body's automatic functions.'Ĭoronavirus, on the other hand, primarily affects the respiratory system, in severe cases resulting in pneumonia. In the Koontz novel, the Wuhan-400 attacks the brain.Īs one character describes it: 'The virus migrates to the brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. Says one character in the novel: 'They call the stuff 'Wuhan-400' because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan' Twitter user Nick Hinton, who first posted a screenshot of the passage from the novel earlier this month, said: 'A Dean Koontz novel written in 1981 predicted the outbreak of the coronavirus!'

One character in the novel says: 'They call the stuff ''Wuhan-400'' because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan.' The characters explain that the Chinese intended to use it 'to wipe out a city or a country' without the need for 'expensive decontamination'. In The Eyes Of Darkness, Wuhan-400 is a bioweapon virus that has a fatality rate of 100 percent within 12 hours. Now the Amazon Charts for the week of Mashow Koontz's nearly 40-year-old book as the number three most sold book of the week, behind Alex North's The Whisper Man and Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light. A Dean Koontz thriller novel about a killer virus that started in Wuhan has become a bestseller amid rising fears over the spread of the deadly coronavirus.įans of the author insisted that his 1981 work The Eyes of Darkness, which describes a virus named 'Wuhan-400' after the Chinese city it originated in, predicted the outbreak of COVID-19, which was first identified in the same city.

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