The Triple Goddess: OPHELIA: a simply divine comedy

THE TRIPLE GODDESS is a novel in three parts about an obsession with a woman-- or rather the idea of one woman-- presented in a context of Fairy Tale; each part 'starring' a different woman who is the same person: the Triple Goddess of classical mythology made flesh. Three mysterious drop-dead gorgeous females whose original was lost to reality... like Orpheus's Eurydice, or Dante's Beatrice... but not lost to the imagination; which is what keeps her alive upon the page for whoever wishes to possess her. Part one, OPHELIA, is Arcadian fantasy, a battle against evil in an English village; part two, ARBELLA, is historical fiction, the past rediscovered in the present; part three, GLORIA, is science fiction, a terrifying vision of the future as the end of the world approaches. Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo is the stunning and charismatic, fey, and oddball curate-with whom the now Archbishop of Canterbury has been besotted since as a junior bishop he ordained her-of a Sussex village that is invaded by a washed-up Devil Lady who has been forced out of Belgravia by younger more ambitious competitors. The 'DL', despite being condemned to an eternity of Hell, is feeling the pangs of self-recrimination and regret, and an impossible desire to reform. Setting herself up as the Lady of the Manor, the Devil Lady moves into the Old Rectory with her demon manservant, along with a raft of lesser demons and imps, and appoints a black-hearted, scurrilous-sermonizing, and foul-living priest, the Reverend Fletcher Abraham Dark, who has barely escaped being defrocked after serving in the stews of the East End, to further corrupt the already well-corrupted neighbourhood. Ophelia's ebullient female partner, Effie, and the many ghosts of the parish who are so attached to Ophelia, whose personality permeates the neighbourhood, that they find it impossible to go to the Light, take arms against the DL, who brings everything in her own arsenal to bear against them. Another powerful representative of the infernal regions arrives, a candidate for the rotating position of Devil itself: the glamorous Lady Violet Enderby, who occupies as her estate the hitherto unknown Moated Grange, a place accessible only by chauffeured airborne Jaguar motorcar, and instigates an exciting plan to bring the Church of England to its knees, not in prayer, but in scandalous disarray....