Shana Thornton

Multiple Exposure Shana Thornton

In the novel Multiple Exposure, Ellen Masters' family has a history?distillers of brandy and owners of the second entrance to Cumberland Cave. Ellen tells the story of growing up with one foot rooted in the town's woodlands, and another as a child of consequences, after events surrounding her father propel the family to places none of them could have foreseen. Ellen returns to the place of her childhood?a University town and Army post share the same parks and rivers. This is a Southern town populated by a watery, haunted landscape and family histories that become legends. She inherits the Masters' property connected to the cave, and she begins her own family there, as a professor at the university, with a husband who is deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. After three students are murdered near her home, Ellen's fears intensify as she suspects a connection to the murders, and she begins to unravel the mysteries of not only that place, but also her mind. In this page-turning narrative, Ellen runs from her past, runs toward the unknowable, blindly guessing, and Multiple Exposure represents the individual's current struggles within today's virtual social culture. Ellen is fumbling through online meetings and Skype calls to her husband from a warzone, and all the while, she searches for an explanation to her world and yearns for a connection with her husband and family.