VIRAL, The Story of a Bad Disease and a Bad Man

VIRAL, The Story of a Bad Disease and a Bad Man.

Here are a couple of warnings before you start into reading this blog.

1. What follows discusses the plot of VIRAL. There are no spoilers about how the book ends but some parts of the storyline are dealt with. If you think this is a problem, perhaps you should read VIRAL
2. If you think that DJ Trump is a decent human being who deserves to be leader of the free world, you may find what follows offensive. For the sake of everyone’s blood pressure, you should probably stop here.

VIRAL is a novel that deals with a global pandemic through two parallel stories. The first is about a man trying to find his way home to the safety of the uninfected island of Newfoundland. The second story concerns a vile, self-centered man who rises to power during the disease outbreak.

The inspiration for the first story was my time spent with monkeys in an Ottawa research building. Working there made me acutely aware of the dangers of pandemics.

The inspiration for the second story was the rise of DJ Trump.

I wondered what would happen if the worst imaginable disease would come along at the same time as a politician as corrupt and inept as DJT. When I wrote the book, all of this was speculation. There was no reason to believe that a pandemic was imminent, and I was confident that the reign of DJT would be soon cut off by the American people coming to their senses after four years of this man making a mockery of their country.

I was wrong on both counts and the book was right.

The disease in VIRAL is caused by a filovirus. The viruses in this family are much more deadly than COVID-19, but the present pandemic has certainly knocked the world off its feet. The similarities between the situation in the novel and reality is at times frightening.

The villain of VIRAL is a radio talk show host turned politician named Fletch. Readers commonly tell me how much they hate that character. Of course, he’s modelled after DJT. The clues aren’t hard to see. He’s self-centered, he lies and fools the population into believing that he has any plans or sense of morality. If all of that isn’t obvious enough, he even tries to build a wall.

The most frustrating part of Fletch’s story is that the people of the island support his lunacy and continue to back him long after it becomes obvious that he’s a fraud. Unfortunately, the same story is being played out with our southern neighbours. In democratic societies we must all be wary of con men and charlatans who offer up dishonest solutions to our very real problems.