IJ study archive

The Blood Sister finale (Maps and Territory)

quote

the unsaved Vice-nun has a moment of epiphanic anti-recidivist spiritual clarity, and averts Blood Sister’s demapping by leaping across the office and cold-cocking the Mother Superior with a large decorative mahogany Christian object so symbolically obvious it needn’t even be named

Context

The cluster's closing hit: salvation from demapping arrives via unnameably obvious crucifix, the idiom now so settled the narration uses it as a plain plot verb. Densest demap cluster in the book outside Gately's hospital chapters.

In anthology