It occurred to me last night that I should find an appropriate book for Halloween.

Something horrific and truly frightening. 

I’ve had H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Tales of Horror on my shelf for years, but still haven’t gotten around to reading it, so I can’t very well recommend that one.  The only other book that may count as a horror novel is Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill which I read so long ago that I can’t remember what it was about. I’m pretty sure I liked it though. Joe Hill is also the author of Horns which was made into a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe and which I thought was very good.

Then I realized that one of the scariest books I have was right in one of my current to-read piles, one that I have been meaning to re-read for the past couple of weeks. So I picked it up last night and after about fifteen minutes, I was already breaking out in a cold sweat. This is not something for the faint-of-heart.

Ten Billion by Professor Stephen Emmott is a short book, only 198 pages, and many of those are composed of only a few sentences. There are a few photos and graphs. He is able to condense facts into short simple sentences guaranteed to scare the pants off anyone who wants life on this planet to continue much as it is now.

It’s about our future on this planet. Or maybe about the lack thereof.

How many people can our planet hold and how will they all be fed?

Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next forty years, we will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of the past 10,000 years combined.

What about our water and energy? (I admit that I did not want to know how much water it takes to produce a kilogram of chocolate…)

Climate change? Biodiversity? How will all of this affect our lives and what is being done about it?

Apparently he has made a documentary as well. The trailer can be viewed here:

http://www.tenbillionmovie.com/