But by 2008, the name had been changed to 'Wuhan-400.' From what we can tell, the biological weapon was originally called 'Gorki-400' when this book was published in 1981. We're not entirely sure when or why this change occurred. In fact, when we searched a 1981 edition of this book available via Google Books we found no references to 'Wuhan.' In that edition, this biological weapon is called 'Gorki-400' after the Russian city where it was created.

While the page from Koontz's novel displayed above is genuine, other iterations of this book used a different name for the fictional biological weapon.

The fictional 'Wuhan-400' has an extremely quick incubation period of about four hours, compared to COVID-19 which has an incubation period between two and 14 days.īut there's more bad news for this prediction.

While researchers are still learning about the coronavirus, the current fatality rate sits at about 2%.

In the novel, 'Wuhan-400' has a 100% fatality rate.

The coronavirus, on the other hand, was not.

In Koontz's novel, 'Wuhan-400' is a human-made weapon.

Here are a few things this 'prediction' gets wrong: However, that's pretty much where the similarities end. It's also true that Wuhan, China, is the city at the center of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. It's true that Koontz named a fictional biological weapon 'Wuhan-400' in this novel. This is a genuine page from the novel 'The Eyes of Darkness.' The passage can be seen in Amazon's preview of a mass market paperback edition of this novel that was released in December 2008. But in February 2020, after such an outbreak had occurred, eagle-eyed Koontz fans shared this passage as if the famous thriller author was a prognosticator. When readers first came across a biological weapon named 'Wuhan-400' in Dean Koontz's novel 'The Eyes of Darkness,' we doubt anyone had the notion that the famous thriller author was 'predicting' a real-world outbreak of COVID-19, coronavirus disease. Other than the name, his fictional biological weapon had little in common with the virus that caused a real outbreak in 2020.

Dean Koontz did not predict an outbreak of a new coronavirus.

Dean koontz the eyes of darkness amazon