Marked by a madman on a killing spree, a young girl relates the sordid tale of a convent possession from the confines of her room in a mental health institution. Why? She was asked by the Devil. She sets the stage in seventeenth century France, where a priest was burned for witchcraft, namely for causing the possession of the local Ursuline sisters. Was this alleged possession and its treatment so different from the experiences of our narrator at the hands of modern psychiatry? Not in the mind of the patient where the witch hunter and the doctor become one. Rachel Summers takes a questionable chapter in the history of the Church and turns it upside-down in the hopes that a different angle will reveal a different past. Part Two of the Mission Maligned series, Godless is a tale of the Other in confrontation with society. Summers tasted this confrontation first-hand inside the Ivory Tower where she received degrees in History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies.
A Ph.D. shelved in lieu of research inverted and traditional values abandoned, the work of Rachel Summers is what some have called a journey into antinomian mysteriosophy where socially sanctioned morality is turned on its head in order to shake out just a few drops of enlightenment. Summers holds degrees in History, Comparative religions, English Literature, and Philosophy, all centered on the late medieval era. Her first novel, CondAmnation, is a retelling of that era’s favored heroine Joan of Arc. Summers’ Joan, however, is not a holy virgin, not a Christian, and certainly nobody’s good girl. Neither, for that matter, is Summers.