Behind the Locked Door

In the 1970s Eric Martin a young attorney is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Eric finds hospitals and traditional treatments insensitive and ineffective so he decides to gamble on an unproven but popular alternative: Laetrile legally available to him only at a clinic in Mexico. While there he befriends an unconventional Catholic priest who introduces him to the mysterious world of spirits and shamanic healers. In a dreamworld populated with characters real and imagined Eric discovers a life hed formerly ignored in order to focus only on things of practical importance. In the course of treatment both at the clinic and by a curandera in a remote mountain village Eric threads his way among gangsters drug dealers corrupt politicians greedy charlatans and a principled scientist. In time Erics health improves and he begins a new and surprising future. This remarkable story shifts between the ordinary and the extraordinary as it raises age-old existential contrasts--dream versus reality optimism versus nihilism and the spiritual versus materialist view of humanity.