GINA KOLATA'S `FLU' A GRIPPING TRUE TALE.(BOOKS)

Byline: TOM VINCENT Knight Ridder

Imagine an infectious disease killing anywhere from 20 million to 100 million people. An Army camp, Devens, near Boston averaged 100 deaths a day, with a barracks building filled with rows of corpses. At the Philadelphia morgue, putrefying bodies were stacked three and four deep, ``covered only with dirty and often bloodstained sheets.''

This is not the new Michael Crichton thriller, or a what-if scenario with some exotic African plague reaching our shores. This is Gina Kolata's ``Flu,'' the true story of a plague that rode in on a pale horse in 1918, and killed more people than World War I.

The story of the flu …