By Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr
1977 Ballantine Books
Paperback, 354 pages
The Bubonic Plague hits Manhattan!
It’s hard to look at older books like this now that we’ve had the Covid
pandemic, but this one is well written and is delivered in a fast-moving text
for most of its telling, revealing little by little until there is a real shit
show happening. A warning: there are some pretty racist assholes in the story
and a silly, sexist subplot.
Sarah Dobbs returns from a
vacation on the West Coast feeling ill and as she rests in her parents’ luxury
home in Manhattan, she gets worse. While hospitalized, it takes a while to
figure out what she is (soon was) suffering from but once they discover
the contagion, it is a race to find everybody that she might have come in
contact with. This part of the book is exciting, and it takes up most of the
first third of the narrative. Thinking it was contained, they hear about a
hooker that had contacted it and spread it all over, even the nice part of
town.
Spanish Harlem is hit hard with
the epidemic and here is where class and racism comes into play. Once the
government knows it is the plague, they are quick to blame the poor for the
disease. Surely this was planted on US soil by Cuba! The president’s top aide,
who has delusions of grandeur and a shady past, is planting that seed into the
president’s noggin. At about 200 pages in, a lot of meetings and arguments
between politicians, bureaucrats, and specialists begin and it starts to bog
down the book. Then our hero contracts the bug…
David Hart is a Department of Health
official. It is he who identifies the problem and as a hero, he is admirable,
trying to save as many lives as possible. I thought that his horniness when he
gazed upon his lovely co-worker Dolores was a little bit jarring and out of
place, but the romance gives his character motive later on. He does catch the
bug after saving thousands and when he wakes up, miraculously cured, the
setting is a post-apocalyptic nightmare of gangs, corpses, rats and fear. And,
quite honestly, silliness. But it’s exciting silliness.
The authors are very thorough
when describing what an invading disease does to the human body as well as what
certain drugs do to the invading disease. It gets very scientific at times but never
to the detriment of the story. A ton of research went into this thriller, and
it all gets you thinking. When all is said and done, the book says as much
about what scumbags all politicians are as it does about trying to live through
a catastrophic time. Not so much has changed, really.
