CHERNOBYL: A STALKER’S GUIDE, new from FUEL Publishing, is an impressive hybrid: part travelogue, part memoir, and part essay. The books weaves together the numerous strands of history, mythology, and ecology that intersect at Chernobyl, from Prometheus as an atomic Marxist saint, to pop-cultural references like the Fallout games and HBO’s Chernobyl, to mushrooms as a potential solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Author Darmon Richter, who has spent much of his life exploring and writing about what he calls “ideological architecture” (which often, but by no means always, focuses on Communist-era buildings) does an impressive job of unifying these numerous trajectories into a highly focused study of a fundamentally misunderstood place.