Tales of Toxic Mushrooms and Dirty Bombs in New York

Writer Jill Ciment has known her share of compromised New York City living quarters. When she was 16, she dropped out of high school and moved to New York with just $150.

She rented an apartment on Avenue D. "It was a 2,500 square foot place that was filled with garbage except for about 400 square feet where we lived," she says. "My favorite part was you had to take a vent off and crawl into a neighbor’s space to use the shower."

Her latest novel, Act of God, is inspired by another nightmarish housing episode, however.

"Some friends of mine in Florida were eating dinner and they looked at the wall and they saw a mushroom growing out of it," Ciment says. "They made the mistake of calling the fire department and the next thing they knew the hazmat squad was there and they were taken out."  

Act of God imagines two elderly sisters living in Brooklyn. Gregarious, thrill-seeking Kat and prudent, unfashionable Edith have only one thing in common: A shared commitment to preserving and publishing the letters of their late mother, an advice columnist.

The sisters’ lives are suddenly upended when they find a large toxic mushroom growing in their apartment. It's the start of a city-wide epidemic. Ciment says she was inspired by 1950s horror films. "I thought that mold was bar none, the creepiest thing I’ve ever run into," she says.

Writer Adam Sternbergh has also been thinking about the destruction of New York. His debut novel published last year, Shovel Ready, is about a garbage man trying to survive after a dirty bomb hits Times Square. His new book, Near Enemy, is its sequel.  

In the aftermath of the attack, the city has lapsed into a "slightly lawless, chaotic place where there is a certain amount of anarchy," Sternbergh explains.  It's a place much like the New York he imagined after watching films like Death Wish and The Warriors as a youngster in Canada.

In the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, astronaut George Taylor realizes he is on earth when he encounters a half-sunken Statue of Liberty.

(20th Century Fox/wikipedia)

But when Sternbergh finally moved to New York from Toronto in 2004, he encountered a city very different from the one depicted in those films. He said his books are commenting on those changes.

"We live in a new city now that’s very exclusive and has $100 million condos and skyscrapers shooting up all over place," Sternbergh says. "So in a way the book is both a fun thought experiment for looking forward but also a bit of an elegy for a city that is disappearing."

Sternbergh says his book is just a “thought experiment”-- following in the great tradition of imagining disaster befalling New York. "There's never going to be anything more unsettling than seeing half the Statue of Liberty sticking up in the sand," he says referencing the 1968 film Planet of the Apes.

But Ciment isn’t so sure that toxic mushrooms couldn’t shut down the city — she says black mold was found in her building in Brooklyn recently, forcing a few tenants out.

Or maybe that's just a reminder that even in the future there are many New Yorks.