Publisher's Synopsis
A victim of severe physical and mental abuse up until the age of ten, Maggie Fellows is all grown up. Now she is a teacher, an artist and an independent woman in her own right. The day she meets John, her world is renewed when, after all those years, she finally falls in love. John wants to marry her despite her inner demons, until one day when a cruel prank goes wrong, Maggie's world is torn apart when the others come back with a vengeance.
They are Mavis, the negative one; Patty, a holy terror; Tank, the protective one; Stanza the renegade; and finally the personality no one meets until the very last, Sally, the one whose goal is to murder anyone who threatens her existence.
When Maggie has a severe mental breakdown, John takes her to the North of England to stay with his mother, Claire, an eminent Psychiatrist. There, Maggie's childhood is revealed.
As all the horrors of life in the cellar house are divulged by the other personalities, Maggie protects her alter egos by creating paintings of unique, tantalising art. When John arranges to have her work shown at an art gallery in Bristol, that night her birth mother enters the gallery, and Maggie has a complete psychotic breakdown.
That's when Sally arrives to take vengeance on them all.
The Cellar House is a heart-rending story about a woman with Multiple Personality Disorder, a sufferer of severe abuse, whose only means of survival is to create others to support her dwindling inner strength, to deal with the demons that won't let her go.
