Historical Fiction Confronts 1918 Influenza Pandemic

A hundred years ago in a remote corner of southwestern Kansas, an extraordinary influenza invaded, a new strain that mutated and grew stronger with each attack, striking healthy adults and turning their immune systems against them. This virulent virus most likely would have run its course—never become the influenza pandemic that killed over 50 million people—had it not coincided with the last year of the Great War when soldiers carried the virus to army training camps and then around the world.

My historical novel, The Antidote, opens in the winter of 1918. Dr. Lorne Miller ponders the season’s influenza. A young farm boy had knocked on his office door, his parents dying. And then two more young men unexpectedly died. Boys their age were dying in the mud on the western front of the Great War, not on the plains of Kansas. Confounded by rapid deaths and driven by duty, Lorne makes a choice he will regret the rest of his life. Later, seeking salvation, he pursues a vaccine for the devastating disease and finds his serious and scientific self embroiled in a public health crisis, power struggles, and politics.

Meanwhile, in defiance, his spirited daughter Helen joins the army to serve as a nurse on the front lines of World War I. Months later, aboard the ship she sails for France, Helen discovers influenza among the troops and knows the contagion has spread. Caught between her desire for independence, work as an anesthetist, and a budding romance with one of her patients, she too struggles with love and duty.

A vivid, compelling and ultimately hopeful novel, The Antidote is alternately narrated by Lorne and Helen—battling the world’s deadliest pandemic from patient zero to its climax—who come to understand they must rely on purpose, family, and love to counteract their grief and guilt over devastating choices.

This moving novel will appeal to readers of Kristin Hannah, Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars, and Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier, another novel of love, war, and medicine set during the grim final year of World War I.

My short story The Enemy Within inspired the novel and received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers.