Steven Froelich

There's a Bug Going Around Steven Froelich

There's A Bug Going Around is a medical thriller/black comedy where the principal character is HIV, the AIDS virus. Felix, the research scientist, needs it as a means of fulfilling his professional ambitions and for settling scores with his father. Bismarck, the homophobic President of a drug company, fears it and wants it hunted down and destroyed. Mrs Plank, the mother of a self-obsessed rock star, accepts it as a weapon in the war of belittlement against her son. Henry, the ineffectual shop assistant, is martyred because of it. Tiger, the gay militant, enlists it for political mobilisation and revenge. Finally Eldridge Kwanza, the African medic, conquers it. The book is a social dance macabre around this modern day plague. The novel was written in the 1990s at the height of the AIDS epidemic when the gay community particularly was threatened with a life threatening incurable and untreatable disease. The core of the book was a piece of science fiction, the idea of using the Leukemic virus to fight HIV. The book was not accepted at the time because the concept of using one virus to battle another was considered too eccentric and fanciful to be credible. The book has lain dormant ever since. Late last year there was a real life medical breakthrough where HIV was successfully used to treat Leukemia. Now that science has caught up with fiction, here it is. The text has not been changed. It is set firmly in 1990s when the paranoia around AIDS was at its height.