When Mary Allen falls in love with Jim Beaman, she doesn't know he has a drug problem, but she does sense demons and angels around him, like "a disturbance in the air, a sound just beyond the register of human hearing." And when Jim—discouraged and depressed, struggling with his addiction—kills himself a year into their relationship, Allen is unable to let him go. In her desperate attempts to recover from the loss, she uses a Ouija board and automatic writing to pull back from reality into the dark recesses of her mind, where she believes she can find him. The result is a mesmerizing trip across the boundaries between this world and the afterlife, a journey that leads her to the brink of insanity and ultimately back to herself.
Mary Allen is a memoir and fiction writer whose themes are spiritual and psychological healing, love, the nature of life and death, and the ways our states of consciousness intersect with our experience of reality. Her writing — and broad range of writing topics — reflect her belief that the personal and the practical, the painful and the numinous, the spiritual and the ordinary are all blended together in our lives and cannot be separated from one another without at least part of the truth being lost.