Carey Dunne’s debut novel, Miracle Cures, is a darkly funny exploration of wellness culture, pseudoscience, and the things we choose to believe. When fact-checker Nelly begins working for a celebrity wellness magazine, she spends her days investigating dubious health claims until a health scare sends her searching for a miracle cure of her own.
Dunne is a writer and former fact-checker whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Baffler, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. Miracle Cures will be published by Simon & Schuster on March 9, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Miracle Cures, designed by Sarah Flood-Baumann. Below, Dunne discusses medieval medicine, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, and how centuries-old quackery became the perfect inspiration for a novel about our modern search for miracle cures.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t really let myself think about a possible cover until after the book sold, because thinking about anything related to a potential publication before the draft was finished made it much harder to write. But once I had a publisher, it was fun to think about possible cover ideas. I kept coming back to the idea of a medieval medical illustration. The novel satirizes contemporary wellness culture, but I liked the idea of connecting today’s kooky cures to their historical precedents. There were so many bizarre “miracle cure” treatments in the Middle Ages, like bloodletting, trepanation, and “mummy powder,” all depicted in beautiful and grotesque artworks for medieval medical manuscripts. I loved this 15th-century illustration I saw online of a dog doctor performing urinalysis on a cat patient and thought it could make a good cover.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The editors and art directors at Simon & Schuster were great to work with. They asked me to send over a doc with images of my favorite book covers, a list of visual elements I hoped the designer might include or avoid, and any specific ideas for cover art. It was cool to get to have some input in the design process, which I didn’t expect to have. Some favorites I highlighted were the covers for Mating by Norman Rush, Pan by Michael Clune, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, and Oddbody by Rose Keating. Design elements I particularly liked were bold all-caps type and bright colors, and things I hoped to avoid included the sexy woman’s back cover trend. I suggested featuring the medieval dog doctor/cat patient drawing, or another medieval medical illustration, and also pitched some not great ideas, like a crystal yoni egg floating in space.
The publishing team eventually sent over nine possible cover designs. The very talented designer Sarah Flood-Baumann came up with a lot of really funny and original concepts, but the clear winner was a design featuring the central figures from The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, an early 16th-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch. He’s one of my favorite artists, so I was very excited about this option. The designer collaged the Bosch image of a doctor extracting a “stone of madness” from a patient’s skull against a background of silver glitter, which gave it more of a contemporary feel and evoked the shiny pull of today’s “miracle cures” hawked by wellness influencers. It felt like a perfect visual representation of the book.
The art director sent versions of the design with the background and type in eight different colorways. Then I spent a couple weeks annoying my friends by asking over and over which color combinations they liked best. My husband eventually refused to continue discussing which shade of beige looked better as the background color. After some back and forth with the very patient design team, we landed on the final cover image.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It was super exciting. It made the book feel “real” for the first time, which was also a little nerve-wracking, but mostly I was grateful to have gotten to work with such a creative team of people.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The Bosch painting on the cover is dense with satirical symbolism, some of which connects to various themes in the book. Cutting a “stone of madness” out of a patient’s head via trepanation, an ancient surgical intervention that involved drilling a hole into the skull, was a quack procedure once believed to cure mental illness, idiocy, or folly. It’s unclear how often this procedure actually happened, but it’s depicted in a bunch of old European paintings. In Bosch’s painting, the surgeon wears a funnel hat, which symbolically suggests that he’s a charlatan. Miracle Cures is narrated by a fact-checker for a celebrity wellness magazine whose job requires her to check the veracity of dubious claims made by charlatan doctors. The woman in a wimple on the right, who’s balancing a book on her head and looking judgmental, is believed by some art historians to depict folly, but in the context of the cover image, she could also represent the book’s fact-checker narrator skeptically evaluating the magazine’s claims.
The original painting also features an inscription in gold Gothic letters that reads, in part, “Master, cut the stone out, fast.” This echoes how the narrator feels while facing a health scare that sends her spiraling into a kind of madness. Like the gullible patient getting a hole drilled into his skull, she grows desperate for someone to fix her by any means possible.
It was fun to learn more about the story behind the Bosch painting, but even stripped of that context, I think the cover image playfully captures the sense of absurdity and humor that runs throughout the book.