There are always invisible connections between people in a smaller community. There are always loyalties and betrayals. In Walking Through Shadows a clutch of these citizens are singled out for attention. What we discover is both disturbing and yet morbidly fascinating. We meet the apparently mute Butterfly Girl who can only find her voice and beauty in the bed of the town's seedy old drunk. We meet posers like The White Prince, the town's revered administrator whose dark sexual fantasies leave him vulnerable to a beautiful young man who loathes him. We meet Spider Girl whose lonely teen life leads her to the dangers of internet chat rooms where Don Wand, the reticent high school teacher, stalks her between his trips to the garbage dump where he collects animal teeth as treasures.

Throughout the town the sway of the the Everlasting Church of the Evangelical holds the town's morality in check while its members slink off into their own little corners of deviance. No one is really safe from the prying eyes, no one will escape scrutiny. Not the incredibly fit Walking Woman who allows her fear to overwhelm her fitness, or the lawyer who must post his nude shadow-dancing routines on YouTube. And not the Invisible Woman, who longs for any contact in her bottomed-out family life, but can only find a connection to herself through watching internet porn.

TARA Manuel is a Newfoundland writer and actor. She is a graduate of The National Theatre School of Canada, and as a young actress performed in many theatres around the country including The Saidye Bronfman Centre and the Monument National in Montreal, The Royal Alexandra in Toronto, and the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg. Her first novel, Filling the Belly, was published in 2003 by Thistledown Press.

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