GHOSTS OF A CURE

Finalist for the 2023 Whistler Independent Book Awards in the Fiction category

Three Stories. One Hallucinogen.

“I had a dream last night. I don’t know how many doses of Cure it took, or how many hours had passed by the time I found myself standing over my catatonic body. My eyes were still open—so vacant and rimmed with blood that you could barely tell they had once belonged to something alive. The Cure must’ve blinded me by then.”

Three unconnected stories are woven together by Cure, a powerful drug that allows its users to manipulate their own hallucinations.

An author suffering from writer’s block brings an unwritten story to life until his characters haunt him into madness. Estranged childhood best friends reunite and conjure hallucinations of their dead loved ones. A pharmacologist experiments with a newly synthesized drug under the supervision of a secret research group.

Ghosts of a Cure tells stories of reality and illusion bleeding into one another until they are no longer discernible.

“From cover to cover, ranging from a house that collapses in on its inhabitants to a seed that grows into an invasive weed, Santos’s writing honours the interplay of nature metaphors and emotional experiences to reach and express the depths that befall human relationships.”

-Alisa Samuel, The Medium