Written from multiple perspectives, The Possessed enters the world of Zion, a religious cult, during the turbulent days of the early 70's. Trouble starts when Julian, a Lakota Sioux, recently returned from Vietnam joins an army buddy in a visit to Zion.
His presence creates a shift in many but especially in Lily. It is her struggle to keep the faith when faith fails, her effort to move more and more deeply into the belief, into the fold, into the irreversible that drives the heart of the story: Her strategy to throw the anchor in so as to not be able to turn back. Only then is one committed. Committed. And Lily tries too, too hard because she no longer believes.
Since her first encounter with Julian she probes the answer to his odd question, "but what does your soul want?" Then with his guidance she experiences the Breathing Earth and the sweat lodge, she makes relations with the Stone People, and can't unmake these relations and experiences that have changed her.
Zion's power to mold and heal those within its boundaries is unmistakable. The street people, the freaks and the lost find a way out of drugs,