Ecstatic

The title: an explanation

An ecstatic is a term once used in places as diverse as seventeenth-century London and nineteenth-century Bengal to describe people whose actions were impossible to understand. The average person saw a man or woman who suddenly spoke gibberish or refused to bathe; a person they knew became a stranger. Seemingly overnight. Some saw these transformed people as possessed, or touched by God. Calling them ecstatics was a way to explain the unexplainable. Now, it seems likely that many of the ecstatics were mentally ill. I learned this curious history long before I finished my novel, but in the way it intertwined religious faith, the human need to know the unknowable, and mental illness, it fit. In a way each member of the family is, at one time, the Ecstatic. They are four people at the mercy of their minds.

— Victor LaValle