Holistic Horrors: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal by L. E. Daniels

Disclaimer: An author and editor, I am not a mental health professional.
Trigger warning: Addiction, grief, loss, animal death.

Holistic Horrors: EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” from American Cannibal
by L. E. Daniels

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol-related cirrhosis claimed a member of my family in Australia. Johnny was so deep in the trenches in his final years, that when he stopped drinking, he experienced seizures, so he didn’t stop anymore. No conversations or bargaining or pleading altered the pattern bleeding the life from him and the slow, torturous death by cirrhosis was something I never wanted to witness again.
A few months after Johnny’s death, I had to schedule the vet to come to the house and euthanize my elderly dog, Tala. The day before the appointment, I sat in the car ugly crying; windows up in the driveway, grief forming concentric rings. Deep into it, I felt grief heaped upon grief until I was mourning everything.

Tala was a border collie-cross, and Johnny loved her. Whenever he stayed with us, Tala ignored me and followed him everywhere. He took her for long, leafy walks and she licked his ears ruthlessly whenever he sat down, and he just laughed and let her.
That day in the car, I howled until the waves fixed upon Johnny. “Goddamn you! I loved you, you fucker! I loved you!” I squalled until I was hoarse. “I never once shamed you! I never asked you for anything but I’m asking you now! You get your ass here tomorrow morning and you come get my dog! You come get Tala and you take her home! I need you to do it! You’re the only one she knows!”The next morning, I held Tala’s body in my arms on the floor. I pictured her dashing off, pain-free like the old days, leaping onto Johnny and bathing his ears. And Johnny laughing and saying, “Of course I’ll look after her until you get here…”
#
In 2023, a family member in the US (who I’ll call Alex) was nearly destroyed by alcohol-induced cirrhosis, except this time, the pattern was secreted by isolation. Across 2020, Alex’s job and relationship ended. We talked over videochat almost daily (I’m in Australia), as two then almost three years of job-seeking, financial stress, anxiety, and depression ate away at Alex.As I noticed Alex’s cheekbones and fingers sharpening over the course of our chats, family members traded impressions and those geographically closest organized a trip to the hospital. Outnumbered and affronted, Alex went. With muscle wasting, a jaunty gait, and liters of fluid accumulating in the abdomen, Alex insisted alcohol was not the culprit but malnutrition.
Without medical insurance, Alex was released from the hospital without tests, and we were told to stop overreacting.
“I hate to eat alone, so I don’t.” Alex, who once loved to cook for the family, vowed to try harder.
A week later, when Alex began to speak in circles, and as the sclera of the eyes, then skin glowed gold, Alex was taken to a different hospital, one that took the symptoms seriously. But even as the toxicology screen revealed alcohol in the bloodstream and elevated liver enzymes, Alex swore malnutrition was to blame.
As we learned about code grays, Ativan for tremors, and restraints that triggered alarms, Alex was threatened with death if “even a drop” of alcohol was touched again. At the doctors’ insistence, it was clear to everyone and eventually to Alex, that alcohol was the parasite destroying everything from the very foundation.
Tethered to a bed, Alex conceded and survived.
#
Months prior, I was reading an ARC of Rebecca Rowland’s anthology, American Cannibal. The anthology is a 2023 Bram Stoker Award® finalist and features a chronological series of cannibalistic stories spanning American history from Candace Nola’s “The Lost Diary,” a recounting of the Roanoke settlement of 1587, to “Y2K Feast” by Jeff Strand.
While all of the stories smolder with fantastic heat, EV Knight’s “The Flannigan Cure” lingered and I returned to it as personal horror unfolded for my family. I wasn’t sure why initially, but realized the story traced the crushing depths of co-morbid addiction—especially the shapeshifting, vaporous denial that left me with nowhere to go with two people I loved. Through her taut narrative and character arc, Knight offered me solid metaphors to hold in private when everyone else around me was teary, angry, and confused.
“The Flannigan Cure” opens: “Two in the morning, and the shakes were getting worse.”
A surgeon in Michigan during the Prohibition Era is threatened with life in prison under the “life for a pint” rule. “If you’re caught sipping from as little as sixteen ounces,” the judge tells Joe Flannigan, “you’re through… This is your last chance.”
And in the opening act, Joe tries. He tries to sip some water and go to bed, to sleep off the withdrawal symptoms. Until—
“Whether the glass he held shattered on the floor because of the tremors or from the shock of the back door splintering open, he’d never know. The two events seemed to happen simultaneously.”
And the story begins its spiral—as life does, as it did for all of us during the pandemic and even more for those who lost loved ones, jobs, marriages.
Joe struggles to work again as a surgeon at a new hospital, navigating the “busy bodies” of the time. To steady his surgical hand, he relents to drink the grain alcohol from his grandfather’s collection of preserved organs—and other things—from the Civil War battlefield, sixty years prior.
With each lap of the spiral, Joe reveals so much about addiction—and at its cunning core, the burning double-down and indignant deceit. The vicious complexity of his dependency makes Flannigan even more monstrous as he concretizes and feeds us the idea that he’s the real hero of this story.
A fetus with anencephaly in his grandfather’s collection becomes a perfect totem, saying, “You know it’s not really about the alcohol, right? You’ve conquered that little problem already.”
“Just like the taboo of hooch,” the narrator tells us, “the transference of addiction had to go to something of equal ethical ambiguity.” And that was “…a cure, a process to withdraw from the beast of addiction. A homeopathic cure. Not food. Not cannibalism. A distraction and nothing more.”
#
I’ve taught writing courses in Australia for over twenty years and I’ve never called in sick or broken down in class. While waiting to see if Alex would recover, I was running a weekly online memoir course to a group of six writers. My colleague, Emma Rennison, tuned in from Melbourne and co-facilitated the workshop with me.
For the second session, I felt I should be transparent about my mental state since I wasn’t as energized as I’d been the week prior. Alex had video-called again right before the session, and like every conversation over those weeks, it was muffled and challenging. I shared just enough with the class, but also said I couldn’t think of anything better than to spend time with such a cohesive group of writers. And they were.
We were discussing voice when I began to read an excerpt from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail aloud—

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true…

—when my own voice locked. It was the most solid chokehold I’ve ever experienced as a presenter. In those seconds, I knew that if I tried to speak another word, I’d sob. Heat spread across my body, my heart began to pound, my eyes burned. I dropped my gaze and tried to regroup, but I was stuck.
Seamlessly, Emma read the rest of the piece.

…To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

Then Emma and the six other writers held the space. And it just breathed.
No advice. No everything will be fine. No you got this.
Like the certainty I felt that Johnny had heard me as I held my dog for the last time, I experienced one of the most profound moments of my life.
It would have been easy to dissolve into humiliation or backpedal into a feigned coughing fit but there it was, an invitation to understand that it’s all right not to understand. And everyone in that course understood that.
As mirrored by Strayed’s words, EV Knight’s story created a similar space. Knight’s words touched the ineffable turmoil within me, named it, and gave me something solid to hold when I needed it, even if I didn’t quite know it at the time.
Horror aligned with mental health can be raw, mysterious, and inexplicably honest. Led into the darkness, I found humility and compassion—for others, for myself—waiting to be claimed.

The HWA Mental Health Charter can be found here: https://horror.org/mental-health-initiative-charter/

L. E. Daniels is a Bram Stoker Awards® nominee for short fiction and an American author, poet, and editor living in Australia. Her novel, Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten (Interactive Publications) is a Notable Work with the HWA’s Mental Health Initiative. Lauren co-edited Aiki Flinthart’s Relics, Wrecks and Ruins (CAT) with Geneve Flynn, winning the 2021 Aurealis Award and co-edited We are Providence: Tales of Horror from the Ocean State (Weird House Press) with Christa Carmen, a 2022 Aurealis finalist.

Recent publications include “Silk” in Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster (Twisted Wing Productions) and “Hangman’s Coming” in Where the Silent Ones Watch (Hippocampus Press). Lauren’s personal essays appear in Holistic Horror, Quick Bites, and 34 Orchard. Her recent poetry is published in The Cozy Cosmic (Underland Press), Under Her Eye, and Mother Knows Best (Black Spot Books), with “Night Terrors” (HWA) a finalist for the 2022 Australian Shadows Award. Lauren runs Brisbane Writers Workshop.

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