Behind the Veil: One Man’s Journey from Opioid Addiction to Spirituality and Beyond

Entrepreneur Malone debuts with an unfocused account of the spiritual awakening that saved his life. After marrying for the second time, the author was professionally successful but deeply mired in an addiction to prescription painkillers. Healing began when his wife bought him a shih tzu puppy, inspiring him to shift his focus away “from my own troubles.” Several years later, recovered but reeling from the death of a close family friend, he visited a psychic who informed him he was a “healer,” initiating a deep dive into spirituality that ranged from apparitions to Marian iconography. He also expounds on spiritual phenomena more generally, ruminating on near-death experiences, meditation as a gateway to new spiritual states, and orbs as “mystical signs, spiritual messengers, or simply unexplained natural occurrences” in cultures throughout history. While Malone’s curiosity appeals, it engenders a surfeit of tangents that obscure the narrative arc, and his stilted prose doesn’t help matters. This eclectic and eccentric personal history fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts. (Dec.)