In his latest book, “In My Time of Dying,” the author of “The Perfect Storm” takes us on what may be the wildest and most frightening ride of his career. To read my full review, please click here.

For decades now, Sebastian Junger has taken readers to some of the most dangerous, bloody and remote outposts on this planet, including the deep sea (“The Perfect Storm”) and Afghanistan (“War”). In his latest book, “In My Time of Dying,” Junger takes us on what may be the wildest and most frightening ride of his career — not to the point of no return, but to its very precipice.

June 15, 2020, dawned for Junger much like any other not-quite-summer day on Cape Cod. But a silent storm had been brewing in the writer, then 58. That morning he was “wrenched from sleep by a dream of my wife and daughters sobbing and holding each other while I hovered over their heads, unable to communicate with them.” He screamed at them; he waved at them. It did not matter. In his dream, he learned that he had died, because as a voice explained to him, “I’d been careless.” He did not immediately connect that dream to the intermittent pain he’d had in his abdomen for more than nine months. He’d been ignoring it, since it came and went, but he remembers thinking at one point, “This is the kind of pain where you later find out you’re going to die.”

The next morning, he was awakened not by a dream, but by the pain, which soon ebbed. That afternoon, he uncharacteristically suggested to his wife that they visit a writing studio located deep in their wooded property. In some of the most compelling prose of his career, Junger details what happened next: “My abdomen seemed to be simply made of pain and nothing else,” and suddenly he was teetering between life and death. “Halfway to the hospital, a spasm shot through me that lifted my body off the stretcher. It felt like hot lava had been injected into me. A few minutes later I lost control of my bowels and a foul-smelling liquid left me, mostly blood.”

To read more, click here.