back

THE ELEVENTH PLAGUE
by John S. Marr, M.D., and John Baldwin
(Cliff Street/HarperCollins, 398 pages, hc, $24.00, 1999)

Maybe it's a personal failing, but I'm finding it easier and easier to despise books like this. "A Novel of Medical Terror," it's called, and while this may be technically accurate, this exercise in epic tedium is still considerably less than the sum of its parts.

"Talent borrows, genius steals," it has been said, with presumably no estimation warranted by those who merely pilfer, although the tandem Johns here at least had the smarts to pilfer a pretty good central idea: a madman's elaborate vengeance modeled after the ten biblical plagues that befell Egypt during the Hebrew captivity. The authors are quite aware that they have filched from the 1971 Vincent Price film The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and do make a passing reference to it, albeit in disparaging terms. It's a grave judgmental error - if you fall far short of bettering something, you look that much worse when dissing it.

The plague-happy psycho of this one is the fussy Dr. Theodore Graham Kameron, a brilliant toxicologist with all the requisite stripped mental gears stemming back to his religious fanatic mother, and the annoying habit of writing about himself in the third person. After a coalition of Christian businessmen screws him over for work done on their research grant, naturally he starts hearing the Voice of God ordering him to get down to the Lord's work of some big-time smiting.

Lethal bee attacks in San Antonio. Anthrax in San Diego. Kentucky racehorses with liquefying brains. It's up to virus hunter Dr. Jack Bryne to figure out what these and other outbreaks have in common - not an easy job, since the authors hammer and saw away for all they're worth to try to make the available pathogens fit the Old Testament template. Their plague of locusts is an especially ragged fit: There aren't any. But Kameron infects a horde of lawyers who have been referred to as locusts, so in his mind it's okay, yet let it be said that Doc Phibes never would have been so lazy as to cheat like this.

Without doubt, the new viruses erupting in hot zones around the world are plenty frightening, and the authors employ a high ick factor in depicting what they do to us nice cushy humans, including a particularly repulsive dalliance with tapeworm cysts. But any nonfiction book on the topic should satisfy your morbid curiosity while sparing you the lame attempts at characterization herein, with passages that read as though they were cribbed directly from planning-stage notecards: "Dr. 'Mac' MacDonald, among America's leading authorities on pediatric thoracic surgery, and as suntanned, fit, and silver-haired as his lofty position mandated." The authors seem to have taken an Aspiring Bestsellers 101 course, with every character either the world's foremost expert on something or in servitude to someone who is, and not a one of them a fully-realized person. It doesn't help that plot discoveries are accompanied by exultations of "Bingo!" and "Eureka!", or that Kameron, in an allegedly climactic confrontation, actually shouts, "You're too late to stop me!" Marr, a former New York City public health official, and Baldwin, listed as the "author of the cult-classic Icepick" (honk if you've ever heard of it) have their science down pat, but as has on occasion been pointed out about doctors, lack a credible human touch.

It's pity enough that the authors themselves cannot be sued for malpractice, but the really bad news is that the title is a misnomer, in that there is no eleventh plague except for the oh-so-shocking final-page threat of a sequel that will use the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as its model.

Inoculations, please - stat.