The Cure Books in Order

The Cure series is set in a future where the state has decided that anger is too dangerous to be allowed. A mandatory injection known simply as the Cure has stripped most people of strong negative emotion, turning them into compliant, eerily placid citizens the rebels call drones.

Not everyone responds the same way. A small number of people become Furies, their rage magnified instead of erased, while a secret police force known as the Bloods hunts down anyone who resists. At the center of it all is eighteen year old Josephine Luquet, Josi, who wakes up naked and covered in blood on the night of every blood moon with no memory of what she has done.

Fury follows Josi as she tries to understand her blackouts and the violent power inside her. Locked in an asylum and convinced she is a monster, she meets Luke, a young man who has had the Cure yet still seems to feel more than the people around him. Their uneasy alliance pulls them out into a ruined world of safe cities, wastelands, and hidden communities who have very different ideas about what it means to be fully human.

In Melancholy, Josi is finally free of the blood moon’s hold but Luke is left in a coma after the events of the first book. Her desperate search for help drags her west into the resistance tunnels, a place where people cultivate fury rather than numb it and where a new Cure for sadness is creeping ever closer. Betrayals, shifting loyalties, and the cost of second chances all come to the surface as she tries to decide who, and what, she is willing to fight for.

Limerence brings the trilogy to its breaking point. The last resistance fighters are trapped underground, hunted from above by Bloods and from below by their own fears, while rumors spread that the government has found a way to eradicate love itself. Josi has become the symbol and weapon of the rebellion, a girl with a blood moon heart who might have to embrace her monstrous side in order to give humanity back its full range of feeling.

Taken together, the Cure books read like a blend of dystopian thriller and intense love story. They are full of bloody fights, claustrophobic tunnel chases, and a constant argument about whether living without pain is worth the loss of anger, grief, and desire. If you are reading in publication order, start with Fury, move to Melancholy, and finish with Limerence, then dip into the split episode editions if you want to savor each stage of Josi and Luke’s journey in more detail.