Goodreads asked Susan McCormick:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Susan McCormick I'm going to tell the story of the inspiration for The Antidote, which came out last spring. I was a parent volunteer for a sixth grade science class chicken wing dissection. I'm a doctor, and I knew I could do this. I bought a chicken the night before and practiced, and I was ready to scintillate the sixth graders by demonstrating the exciting connection between muscles and tendons and bones. I opened and closed the wing, placed it in their hands, showed them the thin strips of tissue coordinating all the action.
Did I see fascination? Excitement? Feigned interest of any sort? Sadly, no.

On career day, surely they’d want to hear about my journey to becoming a doctor, then. And they did. They asked polite and pertinent questions. But they were not truly thrilled.

They were much more enthusiastic about a different topic they were studying, and I was there that week as well. Mythology. Greek gods. Beasts with multiple heads. Fathers who swallowed their children whole. They learned it in school, but they already knew everything there was to know and then some. Why? Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief series.

This got me to wondering. Was there such a fiction series about medicine? The human body? Ailments and health? The excitement of biology or chemistry or engineering or math? Excluding books that deal with video games, very few.

So I set out to write one, weaving in maladies much like The Lightning Thief weaves in mythology. In The Antidote, twelve-year-old Alex Revelstoke discovers a family secret. He can see disease. And not just disease, but injury, illness, anything wrong with the body. He sees skin melt away to reveal the organs beneath, much to his shock and horror. He comes from a family of doctors with this extra gift, going back generations, helping, healing. But Revelstokes are locked in a centuries-old battle with ancient evil itself, an entity called ILL, the creator and physical embodiment of disease. Alex is the last Revelstoke, all that stands between ILL and his new super disease, worse than polio, worse than smallpox.

So instead of battling the Three Fates and Medusa, Alex battles allergic reactions and appendicitis and sudden death in young athletes, and ILL revisits infectious diseases and pandemics from the past like plague, measles and leprosy.

Crazily, this book was written before the pandemic, and it was published the first year in. Which is why Kirkus review called it "Timely and resonant."

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