Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like `guilt, and guilt, and guilt`: these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.`But what is the ninth kingdom?` she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. `It is the kingdom of the frozen will,` comes the reply. `There is no going back.`Sylvia Plath`s strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.