William Saint is dying of cancer.
Stricken with fever, he is rushed to Mercy—notorious as a place to send the sickest of the poor and uninsured to be forgotten—and finds the hospital in even worse condition than his previous visit.
The grounds are unkempt, the foundation is cracking, and like the wild mushrooms sprouting from fissures of decay around it, something is growing inside the hospital.
Something dark…
It’s feeding on the sickness and sustaining itself on the staff, changing them.
And now it wants Willie.
Part medical horror, part supernatural suspense, MERCY is a hard-hitting fever dream of a novel. I enjoyed the hell out of it!”
Tim Waggoner, author of The Way of All Flesh and Eat The Night
AUTHOR NOTE: MY BATTLE WITH CANCER
It took under an hour for a tumor the size of a golf ball to grow under my ear. I had just showered and shaved, so I know the area I was flat. I sat down to watch a late episode of Deep Space Nine, my favorite–The Die is Cast–when I checked the area to make sure I’d done a clean shave, and there it was: a sizable lump. I had just spent the last year fighting an entrenched Lyme Disease infection, and I’d finally gotten myself on tract. I looked forward to returning to my life. The next morning, I called my doctor, and they quickly saw me. Two days later, I had surgery. After a few misses, the Armed Forces Institute identify the tumor as two types of lymphoma: Large Cell and Hodgkins Disease. I was the tenth person in the world to have two lymphomas at once, something they called Hodgkins Lymphoma.
Yeah! I’m special!
Mercy Review (Paranormal Horror) – Sci-Fi & Scary (scifiandscary.com)
A few weeks later, after having trouble identifying it, I started chemotherapy: an intense treatment of CHOP. Chemo was one of the worst experiences of my life. I spent the day in a chemo chair. The stale chemical smell still makes me nauseous when I think about it. Then, especially because of the heavy amount, I spent the next week throwing up every hour. A week after that, my white count died. A week later, I began the process all over again.
I thought that was horrible enough, and I figured the worst was over when I started radiation treatment that September. All I had to do was get zapped in four places once a day for a few weeks. X-rays were easy, right? The effects of chemo hit fast. Radiation burned slow, cumulatively and so much worse. My throat nearly sealed up. The pain felt like a vice gripped my throat. I had sun burn on my face, chest and back. Towards the end of it, I weighed 80 pounds. I could no longer eat. I was burned to my bone, fading away. And it nearly killed me.
In October, I went into the hospital for a month. I lingered on the edge of death. It’s an odd feeling: fading away. I just felt less, made of air, dissipating. Then, somehow, I survived through it. I was declared in remission. I’d beaten extreme odds.
“Dunham has channeled his many brushes with the other side into the exquisitely rendered, lyrical supernatural hospital thriller MERCY. 3.5 out of 4 Skulls.”
FANGORIA MAGAZINE
NOTE: LIFE AFTER CANCER
No one prepared me for what came after. No one ever does. Your support system focuses on your physical survival. I had endured a deeply traumatic experience, made all the worse by my consent, and I had danced on deaths’ door. It changes you. The treatment wrecks you, rewires your brain and eats your nervous system. But when it was all done, I was expected to just forget about it all. I had survived. I should have been grateful. And no one wanted to think about it anymore. For many years I tried to ignore it. I wasn’t allowed to admit that I’d been damaged by it physically and emotionally. I was trained to believe that admitting any kind of disability was a surrender, that I could some how will it better. It took me two decades to understand that accepting and adapting was not failure.
Cancer patients spend their lives making everyone around them feel better.
It did affect me. And I’m still struggling with the trauma.
“Pain and poetry flow in equal measure through these pages. Dunham’s prose strikes deep and hits all the right notes. MERCY is unforgettably vivid.”
David Dunwoody, author of Hell Walks and The 3 Ego
AUTHOR’S NOTE: WRITING MERCY
Mercy was my catharsis. I started writing horror because I wasn’t making any money writing literary fiction. My heart lies with Salinger, Hemingway, but I wanted to get paid. Horror seemed to be the most fecund at the time. After writing the Street Martyr, I moved on to a book about my battle with cancer. There were plenty of horror publishers who wanted to see what I derived from the trauma, but I made a deal with Blood Bound Books at the Horror Writers Association World Horror Con in New Orleans when I went down to represent Hazardous Press with Jay Wilburn. The editors at Blood Bound liked my vision. I returned home and wrote the manuscript in 14 days in a made fever dream. I went into my pain, found the metaphor and combined it with my experience in shamanic work. My character, William Saint, is dying at the start. The cancer isn’t killing him. The treatment is. And he’s taken to a derelict and filthy hospital called Mercy. There, he begins to have visions. He doesn’t know what’s real anymore. The hospital is a nightmare state, full of people turned into dark and hungry creatures. They’re feeding off the sickness, and at the heart of the hospital exists his deepest regret. William even finds love in this hospital and is trapped between the past and the future.
He’s going to die. But that doesn’t he’s found his end. Now, he has to make his life mean something at Mercy Hospital.
Mercy summons an extreme reaction in people. You either love it or hate it. I’m used to five star reviews or one star reviews. It’s not casual horror. It’s about real horror. It’s the best way I could describe what I’ve been through, what I continue to go through.
BUY MERCY ON AMAZON FOR KINDLE OR PAPERBACK
