Riley Keep had been so many things in other lives. Minister. Missionary. Educator of New England's finest ... Failed protector of an entire people. Weakling of a husband. Incompetent father. Drunkard. Friend as best he could ... By accident, Riley caught his own eye in the mirror. Startled, he looked away.

Athol Dickson has done it again! In River Rising he made us want to look away from the stark realities of racism and then compelled us to look back in its mirror and see ourselves. Now, in The Cure, this master of parables holds up another mirror most of us will look into only after fighting it the first two hundred pages or so. This time the parable concerns failure and hopelessness. It is the story of far away pagans and the pagan within us all. And in the end it is a story of ultimate hope.

What sets Dickson apart is the way he uses words like oils on a palette. You don't read about Riley Keep. If you allow yourself you become Riley Keep. I wrote in a review of River Rising that only word did it justice: profound. Now that I have read The Cure, I am at a loss for any other description. The Cure will make you uneasy at times. Its hero is flawed. A failure. And, even in his return to God he is far from perfect. In other words he is real. All I can say is read this book.

The Cure ends with these words: Riley was no longer dead; his ghostly days were over... here at last was something truly good to drink. The Cure is something truly good to drink.