Ok, I got brave enough to write my own synopsis. Here it is:

THE PURGING OF MONICA CAMPBELL is the sometimes brutal and often painful story of a young woman struggling to find security and escape family dysfunction that spans both generations and parallel kinships. It takes place in a small town in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky during the early 1970’s against the backdrop of the conflict in Viet Nam and the struggle for racial integration in the United States.

After the death of both of MOE’s parents nearly a decade before, her older sister, Margie and her new husband, Joe, take over Moe’s care, but after a drunken Joe attempts to rape the thirteen year-old, Margie forces her out of the family home. This results in a temporary respite from the abuse for Moe, but after Joe abandons Margie and their two small children, Margie convinces Moe to come back home.

Moe returns to Mount Laurel and renews her childhood friendships with Will and Janie Taylor and becomes romantically involved with the town’s young Deputy, Dennis Colbert. To her, he represents all that is wholesome and secure. Her life seems to finally be all that she had hoped for until she discovers that she is pregnant with Dennis’s child. Margie feels threatened by Moe’s pregnancy and attacks Moe in a fit of rage, which turns out to be the first in a string of events that ends in terrible consequences for Moe, her friends and her family.

After the assault, Moe moves in with her friends, Will and Janie Taylor. They are free-minded spirits who support racial equality and the equality of women and are opposed to the war in Viet Nam. Will meets several anti-war demonstrators in Richmond and invites them to visit Mount Laurel. Several are African-American. When one of them is lynched in front of Will and Janie’s home, the injustice and sheer cruelty shocks the town into silence.

While the investigation drags on for months, the horror of this act of viciousness triggers memories long repressed in Moe of her childhood. Her struggles are on many fronts. She wrestles with her dreams, the door to those repressed memories, and tries to learn more about her mother, hoping this will allow her to understand why she was so cruelly treated. Moe and Janie challenge the local law enforcement agencies to solve this despicable crime- despite the impact this has on her pending marriage to Dennis. They watch helplessly as a town folds in to protect its own, all the while trying to go on with the everyday business of living.

In the end, Moe finds that she and her family are central to all that has happened in ways that she never guessed and never anticipated. The self-pity and self-blame that has smoldered within her for months and even years, erupt in a fiery act intended to destroy her sordid past forever.

THE PURGING OF MONICA CAMPBELL is a frank and unflinching account of the worst of one family’s perversions, but is also a testament to the will to survive and overcome, and a belief in redemption.



Oh, I will likely make a few minor edits, but condensing over 100,000 words into a few paragraphs was not an easy task!