Stalking the Atomic City, by Markiyan Kamysh

The subtitle gives a good picture of what this book is about: "Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl"-- published originally in Ukrainian in 2015, and translated into an occasionally chic (by intention) but faltering (in slangy expression) English in 2022. It is a quasi-memoir of a man from Kyiv who is obsessed with exploring the Exclusion Zone around Chornobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. He leads westerners through the area in a kind of disaster tourism, all the while drinking heavily, smoking heavily, and complaining about the winter cold and snow obsessively. Kamysh wonders frequently what its the point of him doing so, and so does the reader. He stalks the area (the apt terminology is clearly intended to echo Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film, The Stalker, doubtless an inspiration), encountering looters and scrap hunters, and trying to avoid the police who chase them. All the while he has a complete indifference to the toxicity of the area. There are photos (which are bland) and a map (which leaves out many of the sites visited in the text). Otherwise the text is merely a paean to danger fetishism.