Daniel Kalla's new novel deals with the reappearance of the plague - The Western Star

Since he was a kid Dr. Daniel Kalla has had a bit of a thing for the Black Death.

“We grow up as kids with nursery rhymes and stories about it. I was fascinated by it,” Kalla recently told Postmedia. “It still remains the biggest natural disaster in terms of lives lost.

“That’s how a disastrous of an event it really was. I was culturally aware of it.”

For the record the most common estimate is that the deadly disease killed off one third of Europe from 1347 to 1351.

Kalla, who is the head of the Emergency Medicine Department at St. Paul’s Hospital in B.C., has taken that long running curiosity of the plague that flattened Europe in the mid 14th century and put it front and centre in his new, just released, novel " We All Fall Down."

“I learned so much of my history growing up by reading James Michener and these people who take real history and put a couple of characters you can relate to behind it and I’m trying to do the same thing in this case with some history of the Black Death, but also a lot of the medical knowledge and background of the plague and infectious disease,” said Kalla. “I’m trying to put the face on the victims, the uncertainties of the heroes, of the doctors, who have to deal with this. I think when you do that it gives people a vibrancy to a story.”

In this, his 10th, novel the plague has resurfaced in Italy and Kalla’s protagonist — a NATO infectious disease expert named Dr. Alana Vaughan (think a Julianne Moore type) — is on the case and on the hunt for the source of the dark disease.

“She started off in the military and has an incapacitating shoulder injury. That’s why she could never be a trauma surgeon. That’s why she ended up being an epidemiologist because she can’t use her arm that way. She is kind of this wounded person whose been finding her way,” said Kalla. “I always thought, right from when the story started, that this was going to be a strong independent woman.”

The idea of an ancient disease threatening the human population is not such a far-fetched fictional creation. A recent Atlantic magazine story talked about the increase in cases of “old” diseases like Typhus, TB and even Trench Fever among Los Angeles’ ever growing homeless population.

“When I started practicing medicine you didn’t ever think you would see syphilis again. It was a disease of the 19th century,” said Kalla, adding that the resurrection of certain illnesses is what partially inspired him to do this novel.

“There has never been a natural catastrophe to hit mankind like the Black Death,” said Kalla. “The bubonic plague still exists and we’re pretty certain it was the bubonic plague that caused the Black Death.”

According to Kalla, the bubonic plague still occurs in places like rural Africa and Madagascar. The U.S. reports about 10 cases of it each year, he says.

But what if it came back bigger and stronger? We All Fall Down asks that question and asks how could that happen?

Vaughan’s initial theory is that bioterrorism is behind this modern Italian-based case of Black Death.

The search for the source sees Vaughan and an ex-lover she knew from her WHO days in a kind of Dan Brown da Vinci Code situation as they wind up at an ancient monastery with their hands on a very interesting medieval journal. The journal holds clues that the pair must decipher if they are to stop the deadly disease from spreading. In the end you get a fast paced thriller with an historical overlay and a dash of romantic tension.

“When this starts in the novel, I hypothesize that one of the early theories is it is bio-terrorism,” said Kalla, who will be part of a panel at a Vancouver Writers Festival presentation called Incite: Riveting Crime Tales on April 17 at the Alice MacKay Room at the Vancouver Public Library. “Somebody is deliberately spreading it. Then Islamic extremists get blamed early on and suddenly there’s violence against Islam that seems very topical. Of course that’s not the source, not the cause.

“There’s a historic section that has a diary from a doctor who lived in that same monastery during the Black Death, and it lets them parallel his experience because he gets close to a Jewish family whose later scapegoated for what’s going on then,” added Kalla. “So we go back and forth and parallel.”

Going back and forth afforded him the opportunity to make a statement — to point out the egregious nature of pointing fingers and fanning fear.

“Now there’s Islamophobia and white supremacy. The book hypothesizes what if the Black Death leaked out around an old monastery that was being condemned for very sketchy reasons for illegal reasons and being rebuilt. Then suddenly the Black Death starts to pop up,” said Kalla peeling away some of the layers of his plot. “It gave me all these chances to parallel modern society, medieval society, all the risks that we have.

“You know the Black Death was all about superstition. It was all about fear and panic and the response to it. My point is while we have evolved a lot as a race we are still susceptible to those same basic instincts.”

Moving back and forth can be head scratching but Kalla keeps a lot of notes and at the end of the day his other job is at the top of the stressful job food chain. He admits he actually likes the complicated nature of multi-layered narrative.

“It did make balancing all the storylines a bit challenging, but it really was a hell of a lot of fun,” said Kalla. “It was like having multiple personalities at some points writing these stories.”

Kalla has been practicing emergency room medicine for 25 years. During that time he has produced best-selling novels like "Pandemic", "Resistance", "Rage Therapy", "Blood Lies", "Cold Plague", and "Of Flesh and Blood."

“Lifestyle wise, emergency medicine is a great job to do something on the side because it is such shift work. You don’t work the traditional Monday to Friday banker’s hours. In fact I don’t often work shifts at regular times,” said Kalla who is also a clinical associate professor at UBC.

Kalla has had four of his novels optioned by movie and TV producers and he says there is some movement on that front right now.

In the meantime he is busy saving lives and writing books. He has already finished novel No. 11. For this one Kalla sets his story in Vancouver during the very contemporary fentanyl crisis. That novel, which will have another female protagonist, is slated for a 2020 release.

With books that hinge on big world problems like the potential spread of earth scorching diseases there have been instances when Kalla has given himself a bit of fright while writing.

“100 per cent. In my first book 'Pandemic', which became a bestseller, it was topical. It was about bio-terrorism. It scared me and I thought for a while ‘oh my God am I putting ideas out there for people?’ Then I thought no. They know about this, they have thought about this. But as I get into this it scares me to think about the people in real life, the heroes, that have to actually respond to this kind of stuff.”

As he progressed through what he called the “badness in the novel,” it occurred to Kalla that if these things were to ever happen in real life we would be “hooped.”

“That’s the whole point of this novel,” said Kalla, who is the son of two doctors. “I think it could happen again, maybe not exactly in the terms I put it in. There is certainly some added dramatic twists that are fictional, but it could happen.”

By Dana Gee

dgee@postmedia.com

twitter.com/dana_gee

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