In WITHER and WITHER'S RAIN, Elizabeth Wither, the leader of a murderous coven of witches, terrorized the town of Windale with her evil magic. Only the courage and wits of teenage witch Wendy Ward could dispel Wither's wicked curse. After destroying Wither a second time, Wendy thought the ancient evil was defeated. She was wrong. As Elizabeth Wither took her dying breath, she cursed Wendy. In WITHER'S LEGACY, the curse awakens a demon that has one goal: destroy Wendy Ward. Now the young Wiccan must hone her supernatural gifts and, with her friends Kayla and Hannah, defeat Wither's black magic once more. But it won't be easy. Wendy has faced witches before in human form, but her new nemesis is a seven-foot-tall monster with razor-sharp fangs and a taste for human blood. The wendigo won't be satisfied until Wendy is dead.
Once they were strangers bound by their fears of a demonic entity called Elizabeth Wither. They saw her come to life on Halloween in the historic college town of Windale, Massachusetts. They saw their dark dreams come true by the terror she wrought. They watched her crushing death in tons of falling stone. But if Wither is gone and their nightmares are over, why do they wake up screaming? Wendy Ward -- a college student with a gift for white magic -- can sense that the town of Windale is in for a dramatic change in weather. There's a new chill in the air....It's whispered in the warnings of an old woman. It's hidden in the corrupting legacy of a newborn baby. It's waiting in an ancient evil impatient for a human host. And it's being carried in the creeping flow of black blood -- Wither's rain.
The Peruvian mystic St. Rose of Lima (Isabel Flores y Oliva, 1586-1617) was canonized in 1671 as the first saint of the New World and remains the object of widespread devotion today. In this engrossing new study, Frank Graziano uses the example of St. Rose to explore the meaning of female mysticism and the way in which saints are products of their cultures. Virginity, austerity, eucharistic devotion, incessant mortification, and mystical marriage to Christ characterized the devotional regimen that structured St. Rose's entire life. Many of her mystical practices echo the symptoms of such modern psychological disorders as masochism, depression, hysteria, and anorexia nervosa. Graziano offers a sophisticated argument not only for the origins and meaning of these behaviors in Rose's case, but also for the reason her culture venerated them as signs of sanctity. In the process he explores a wide range of themes, from the idea of suffering as an expression of love to the assimilation of childhood trauma through religious repetition. Graziano also offers a penetrating analysis of the politics of Rose's canonization. He finds that her mystical union with God--bypassing the institutional channels of sacrament and priestly mediation--was inherently subversive to the bureaucratized Church. Canonization was a cooptation by which Rose's competing claim to Christ was integrated into the Catholic canon. The book concludes with a fascinating exploration of mystical eroticism, with its intense experiences of vision and ecstasy. The eroticized suffering of many mystics is shown to be very human in origin: the mystic's wounded love is projected onto a God conceived to accommodate it. Wounds of Love is based on a decade of research in archives, rare books, and an extraordinary range of secondary sources. Introducing an innovative method that integrates history, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and clinical psychology, this compelling work offers a bold new interpretation of female mysticism.
