NINE SISTERS DANCING
MOSES LEADS THE SOUL THROUGH THE WILDERNESS
Author Ed Moses explores the dark worlds of myth, and child abuse, and multiple personality disorder in his chilling psychological novel, Nine Sisters Dancing.
Nine Sisters Dancing's central character, a young woman named Laurel, was savagely abused during early childhood-events she remembers in flashbacks throughout the novel only as dissociated visions compounded of pain and sweet-sounding lies. In reflexive self-defense, Laurel's personality has split into nine animal selves: Spider, Rat, Cat, Vixen, Bitch, Coyote, Bear, Wolf, and Snake. Together these nine help Laurel search through the midnight wilderness of her soul for Little Girl, her lost core self, and in that underworld of illusion and bent reality they journey through the realms of Memory, Terror, Grief, Anger, Death, and, eventually, Life.
Nine Sisters Dancing's graphic depictions of rape, incest, and abuse are not for the faint of heart; parents be warned: this is no talking animal show. Even more disturbing, perhaps, are the truths about the human heart and mind that Moses's tale reveals-how easily they can be molded, and how easily they can be broken, and how labyrinthine and tortuous is the road to renewal.
Yet what keeps Nine Sisters Dancing from being merely sordid are exactly these truths, which Moses demonstrates through an impressive facility with the languages of mythology (especially Native American) and of Jungian and clinical pathological psychology. Moses's skillful use of symbols and archetypes gives the novel a compelling ring of truth. What redeems the novel-and its heroine-is its faith and hers in the durability of the humanness that lies hard and dormant as an acorn at the center of every individual. It is out of that seed that the final image of Nine Sisters Dancing grows: "She is a straight young tree blooming."
About the Author: Ed Moses is the author of the highly praised novels One Smart Kid (Macmillan, 1982) and Astonishment of Heart (Macmillan, 1984). In review of the latter as "provocative and engaging," the New York Times Book Review praised Moses's work for its complexity and Moses himself as "an extremely intelligent writer." The Cleveland Plain Dealer has said of his earlier work, "A Major League read. He has yet to pen a phony character or a situation that reeks of contrivance. His style is clean and seemingly effortless. Most important, his characters are people we come to care about." Moses is an assistant professor of English at Bloomsburg (Pennsylvania) University. He lives and writes in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. |
