Godless — Rachel Summers

Marked by a madman on a killing spree, a young girl relates the sordid tale of the case of a convent possession from the confines of her room in a mental health institution. She sets the stage in seventeenth-century France, where a priest was burned for causing the demonic bewitchment of the 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.Godless takes a questionable chapter in the history of Catholicism and turns it upside-down in the hopes that a different angle will reveal a different past, and present. Godless is a tale of the despised, free-thinking Other in confrontation with a liberal society whose modern-day Inquisitors promote little more than conformity and submission. Rachel Summers, known as the Dropout Philosopher, holds degrees in History, Comparative Religions, English Literature, and Philosophy but ran afoul of academia when her dissertation proposal was rejected as something that might cause a scandal. She walked away and took the path of fiction. This is her second “scandalous” novel.