About the Author
J. Evan Ramos has an MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University. His debut novel is The Sacred Datura, a dark queer contemporary fantasy that uses Taino and indigenous myths to address themes of loss, forgiveness, and acceptance. He is currently working on a new holiday horror book with a romantic subplot set to release in Fall of 2025. Two of his short stories are published in the 2018 and 2019 anthologies California’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction.
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The Sacred Datura
Sam’s younger brother, Jaden, went missing years ago. He was lost in a canyon full of coyotes, rattlesnakes, and bell-shaped flowers known as Sacred Datura. She knows that if she just accepted who he was, he’d still be with them.
Sam uses her guilt as a way to justify her recklessness. She’s at risk of not graduating high school, ditching classes to skate and drink. To suppress the guilt, her boyfriend offers a concoction made from the strange flowers found within the canyon. Her visions are pleasant at first but contort into horror, a horror that provides clues that Jaden may still be alive, that he may be lost in an unnatural place.
With themes of loss, forgiveness, and acceptance, The Sacred Datura is a queer contemporary fantasy which uses indigenous myths as a means to escape the cruelty found within the suburbs of the American Southwest at the turn of the new millennium.
Will Sam be able to solve the mystery of her brother’s disappearance? Will she be able to bring him home? Will she ever be free from her guilt?
J. Evan Ramos 