Lily Whites of Steel

Born into the flaming trenches of a true spiritual hell, Lacey Hart spends her impoverished childhood lost in the strange shadow world between heaven and the demonic underworld in her senses. She uses religion to mold herself into The Perfect Daughter so that she might evade her disturbed mother's malevolence. Lacey is a demure child whose primrose sweetness and white-laced stoicism hearken back to the puritanical era- times when bewitchment infiltrated even the purest breath of beauty. In school she is an idiot savant, and she believes herself to be haunted by the devil. But outside the physical, emotional, and sexual torture chamber of her home, Lacey rarely ruffles feathers. Then she turns sixteen. Her sexuality, which she has always felt had its roots in evil, blooms like an overripe fruit from the center of her soul. Around the same time, Lacey and her best friend Sabrina uncover the gift that has both defined and isolated them all their lives: intuition. Emerging from the coccoon of their silence into awareness, the two friends find themselves also immersed in the dark side of magic. It is on this spiritual cusp between heaven and hell that they experience the heights of ecstasy- but drift inevitably toward the dredges of humanity on the outskirts of life. Like twinned flames, Lacey and Sabrina embark upon the bohemian "magical mystery tour" of their twenties with the quixotic candor and unexpected bravery of the truly eccentric. Then grave illness strikes, unplanned pregnancy arises, and they learn the power of true love to bloom one's spirit into the oneness with all things that is true freedom. The story of two women who dare to submerge themselves completely into any given moment, Lily Whites of Steel is a fearless exploration of the thin line between freedom and destruction, dogma and authentic mysticism, and- perhaps most hauntingly of all- truth and madness.