Fury (Charlotte McConaghy) Books in Order

The Fury episodes are a serialised version of the first book in The Cure, designed to pull you into Josi Luquet’s world in sharp, novella sized bursts. The setting is a future society where an immunisation known as the Cure has stripped citizens of anger and is working toward erasing sadness next.

On the surface this has created safer cities and calmer streets. Underneath, it has produced two terrifying side effects. Some people become Furies, their rage amplified rather than erased, and others join the Bloods, a brutal secret police force tasked with hunting down anyone who still feels too much.

Episode 1 keeps the camera tight on Josi. She wakes every year on the night of the blood moon in a locked room, naked and covered in someone else’s blood, with no memory of what she has done. Doctors and guards in the asylum treat her as a subject and a weapon, until a quiet boy named Luke appears and insists that she deserves answers.

In Episode 2, Josi bolts rather than face the feelings Luke stirs up. Life outside the facility is even more dangerous than she expected. Villages are hollowed out, those who took the Cure move like sleepwalkers, and the Bloods hunt any sign of unregulated emotion. Luke follows, hiding a history of his own and a link to the very system that made Josi a monster in her own eyes.

Episode 3 compresses the story into a single, desperate standoff. Trapped in a room as the blood moon rises, Josi must decide whether to trust Luke’s confession and lean on the people who care for her, or to surrender to the cold, unstoppable rage inside her. The fate of the nascent resistance and of the Cure program itself hangs on what she chooses.

Across all three parts you get many of the series’ hallmarks in concentrated form: intense first person narration, body horror, swoony but complicated romance, and a constant question about whether an emotion can be evil in itself. If you like character driven dystopian stories, starting with the Fury episodes is an easy way into McConaghy’s earlier science fiction world before you tackle the longer omnibus editions.