How to Stay Safe When the Big One Comes

For most of the past three years, I’ve worked as a book critic, which is not a job that affords me many opportunities to scare the living daylights out of my readers. (Authors, occasionally; readers, no.) But earlier this month, when a story I wrote about a dangerous fault line in the Pacific Northwest hit the newsstands, the overwhelming response was alarm. “Terrifying,” the story kept getting called; also “truly terrifying,” “incredibly terrifying,” “horrifying,” and “scary as fuck.” “Don’t read it if you want to go back to sleep,” one reader warned. “It’s hard to overhype how scary it is,” Buzzfeed said. “New Yorker scares the bejesus out of NW,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote.