In the aftermath of a deadly outbreak bearing similarities to the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, a city at the tip of Africa is losing its mind—complete with hallucinations, paranoia, and good old-fashioned ghost sightings.

Is it the result of secret government experiments, an episode of mass hysteria, the effects of trauma, a sign of the end times?

In a quarantined city in which the inexplicable has already occurred, rumors, superstitions, and conspiracy theories abound.

In these strange days, Faith works as a full-time corpse collector and a freelance truthologist, putting together disparate pieces of information to solve others’ problems.

But after Faith agrees to help an orphaned girl find the girl’s abducted baby brother, she begins to wonder whether the boy is even real. Meanwhile, Sans, a ponyjacker in the human hair trade, is so distracted by a glimpse of his dream woman that he lets a bag of money he owes his gang partners go missing—leaving him desperately searching for both and soon questioning his own sanity.

Over the course of a single week, the paths of Faith, Sans, and a cast of other hustlers—including a data dealer, a drug addict, a sin eater, and a hyena man—will cross and intertwine as they move about the city, looking for lost souls, uncertain absolution, and answers that may not exist.

Part ghost story, part whodunit, part palimpsest, THE DOWN DAYS is a rollicking exploration of the mutability of memory, the subjectivity of perception, and the notion that truth is ultimately in the eye of the beholder.

 

Ilze Hugo is a South African debut author with degrees in fine arts and English studies, along with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies like The Ghost Eater and Other Stories and My Holiday Shorts. As a freelance writer, she’s written for magazines to guidebooks to ad campaigns and even the odd comic. She lives by the ocean in Muizenberg, Cape Town, with her husband and two children.