mutilation, torture, child abuse, cannibalism, necrophilia
Over the next twenty-eight hours, Jessie will come face-to-face with her most terrifying nightmares that exist in the last place she would ever look...her mind!
This book is a fantastic character development story. Though most of it involves a single character, and virtually no action, it does draw you in. If you ignore the weak end, it's a good story, but not for everyone (extremely graphic).
In this novel, through an odd set of circumstances, a woman named Jessie winds up chained to a bed in the middle of nowhere and has nothing but the voices in her head and memories of abuse to keep her company until she figures out how to escape. One of the 'voices' she hears is that of her old college roommate, Ruth. Ruth was always a tough gal, a feminist, no-nonsense, and Jessie stopped being her friend when Ruth pushed her to deal with her past instead of sweeping it under the rug. At one point she thinks about the last time she heard from Ruth:
'The card had borne a blurry Arizona postmark and the information that Ruth had joined a lesbian commune. Jessie hadn't been terribly surprised at the news; had even mused that perhaps her old friend, who could be wildly irritating and surprisingly, wistfully sweet (sometimes in the same breath) had finally found the hole on the great gameboard of life which had been drilled to accept her own oddly shaped peg.'
To balance out the positive portrayal of a queer character, a negative one was included. The 'demon' of the book, who torments Jessie, breaks into crypts to rob the corpses after screwing them, and occasionally eating them, turns out to 'prefer men.'