The Tower (novel)

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The Tower is a 1973 novel by Richard Martin Stern. It is one of the two books that was used to create the movie The Towering Inferno, the other being The Glass Inferno.

The story concerns the events in the penthouse restaurant during the grand opening celebration of a brand new high-rise building in New York City after a terrorist suicide bomber detonates a home-made explosive in the basement control room of the building. The explosion causes fires through the building, and traps the people in the penthouse. Unable to escape through stairs, attempts are made to allow them to escape by running a breeches buoy to a nearby building. The chair device is only partially successful, and in the end, most of the people trapped in the tower die from the effects of the fires.

Stern allegedly wrote the book due to the building of the World Trade Center, which, ironically, of course, would itself become a victim of a terrorist attack in which people on the top floors were unable to escape.