The Inner Landscape

Ghosts, Gentlemen, and the Art of Falling Apart

If you’re confused by the number you missed a few announcements. The blog is now posting on Tuesdays and Fridays. At the end of each post the books will be listed through the upcoming few weeks. Yes, I’ve gone from foolish assuming you’ll still want to read each book after I discuss it to maybe even wanting to read it to be prepared for your own take on my thoughts. Oh, the horror (this is the horror film fan response used regarding instead of using the more well known you know what happens when you assume something.) I also am adding a suggested title in case you enjoyed a particular post and and are interested in reading further into the author.

We’ve finally crawled out of Comala. After wandering through Juan Rulfo’s graveyard of voices—the dead whispering, the living barely louder—I thought we’d earned a break. A little sunlight. A little levity. Maybe even a book where someone isn’t doomed from page one.

But, well… I lied. Sort of. (But we’ll keep this one shorter. Shorter with two books. That’s a fair trade, right?)

Apparently, my subconscious had other plans. Instead of choosing something bright and cheerful, I reached for Walker Percy—a man constitutionally incapable of writing about anyone who isn’t “spiritually concussed”. Somehow, without meaning to, I picked two books that slide perfectly into the arc we just finished. We left behind ghosts who wanted to be heard, only to arrive with a man who moves through the world like he doesn’t even know he’s alive. Fun times had by all.

Welcome to the next arc: Identity, Collapse, Absurdity, and that strange clarity that comes when the self finally cracks.

This time, we’re following Will Barrett—first in The Last Gentleman, where he drifts through life like a polite apparition, and then in The Second Coming, where that drift becomes a full-scale psychiatric nosedive. If Pedro Páramo was about the dead refusing to stay silent, Percy gives us the opposite: a man who can’t quite hear himself.

And yes, this arc will be darker in places. But it will also at times be funnier. Even Percy is a master of the absurd; he gives us permission to laugh again. We need that desperately—to laugh at the shadows when we see the flash. Think of this as the season where the critics say the show finally remembers it’s allowed to have jokes after a few episodes that were “powerful” but deeply exhausting.

So let’s step out of Comala, shake the dust off our shoes, and follow Will Barrett into the next landscape—one where ghosts aren’t dead, identity is as Paul Simon says “slip-slidin’ away,” and sometimes the only way forward is through a complete and total collapse.

Part One: The Drifting Ghost

What makes The Last Gentleman so quietly devastating is that Will Barrett doesn’t just move like a ghost—he relates like one. His relationships aren’t connections so much as they are collisions. He drifts into people’s lives the way fog drifts into a room: present, aimless, without intention, without shape, and without the ability to grasp or hold onto anything.

His interactions with the Vaught family are the clearest example. They adopt him emotionally before he ever decides to be adopted. They project meaning onto him because he doesn’t have any for himself. Will becomes a blank surface onto which other people write their needs, their grief, and their expectations. Because he doesn’t know who he is, he simply lets them.

That’s the tragedy of Will Barrett: He is a man who becomes whatever the room requires.

• Not out of manipulation.

• Not out of deceit.

• But because he has no internal anchor.

As we learned from Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, an anchor isn’t just a weight; it’s a requirement. It keeps you tethered and attached to the world. Without it, you simply float away.

His romance with Kitty Vaught is just another version of this pattern. It’s not even a love story in the sense that we usually understand it—it’s a ghost story. Will doesn’t fall in love; he drifts into it. He’s drawn to her because she possesses a solidity he lacks. She knows who she is, even when she’s wrong. Will doesn’t know who he is, even in the moments when he’s right.

Percy writes him with this eerie, floating quality—a man who is always slightly out of phase with his own life. He is simply completely uninhabited as a person. He’s not a ghost because he died. He’s a ghost because he’s never fully arrived.

Part Two: The Freefall

Where The Last Gentleman is drifting, The Second Coming is a freefall.

In this stage of the journey, Will Barrett’s relationships aren’t just collisions—they are implosions. His marriage, his faith, and his sense of purpose have all dissolved. Even his body betrays him, with neurological episodes that blur the line between physical illness and a total psychological collapse.

And then there’s Allison.

Allison is the key to this deeper dive because she is the mirror Will didn’t know he needed. She isn’t a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”—she isn’t there to save him. She is a young woman who has survived her own psychiatric trauma, escaped an institution, and is attempting to rebuild a self from the ground up. She is what Will might become if he survives his own collapse. She represents the possibility of clarity on the other side of a breakdown.

Their relationship is a moment of vivid recognition. They are two people who have fallen through the floor of their own identities and crashed into the same basement.

Will’s descent into the cave—an actual, literal cave—is one of the most striking metaphors for psychiatric collapse in American fiction. It is a mind turning itself inside out. This connects perfectly to the “Well” scenes in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Whether it’s a well in Japan or a cave in the American South, the message is the same: When the self collapses, the world becomes a map of that collapse.

Percy’s use of the absurd isn’t just comic relief. It’s the reality of how the world looks when your mind is “frying”. Everything becomes too sharp, too strange, and simultaneously meaningful and meaningless.

Yet, this is where the hope lives. Will Barrett’s collapse finally forces him to confront the question he’s been avoiding for decades: Who am I when no one is looking? For Will Barrett, the answer isn’t pretty, but it is real. That is why The Second Coming ultimately feels more hopeful than The Last Gentleman.

Collapse becomes clarity. Absurdity becomes survival. Connection becomes possible.

And with that there’s hope. Only a tiny bit. But sometimes, that’s just enough.

Closing: Where We’re Headed Next (And why I’m still reading books about people falling apart—and you are, too. You’re still here, aren’t you? Hello?)

So, that’s where we’re leaving Will Barrett for now: halfway between a ghost, a gentleman, and a man who has finally realized that the floor beneath him is not, in fact, load-bearing. If The Last Gentleman was a gentle nudge toward existential confusion, The Second Coming is a shove down the stairs—but in a way that somehow leaves you feeling hopeful. About the possible.

Now that we’ve officially entered the “Psychiatric Arc,” things are only going to get stranger, darker, and—mercifully—funnier. If I’ve learned anything from literature, from life, and from the more than occasional visits (um, yeah, that’s an s) to the psych ward, it’s that the universe has a terrible sense of humor. The only winning move is to laugh first.

That’s why you’re here with me: to help me laugh at the shadows while we look for the flash.

The Upcoming Tuesday/Friday Schedule:

• Tuesday, May 12: Ten Days in a Mad-House (Nellie Bly)

• Friday, May 15: The Snake Pit (Mary Jane Ward)

• Tuesday, May 19: Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane)

• Friday, May 22: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)

• Tuesday, May 26: Faces in the Water (Janet Frame)

• Friday, May 29: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Joanne Greenberg)

• Tuesday, June 2: Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor)

• Friday, June 5: The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

• Tuesday, June 9: Darkness Visible (William Styron)

More Walker Percy?: Try his debut novel The Moviegoer.

ONWARD

I. The final Saturday Night Live cold open: looking forward by looking back one more time

When I began the blog, I said it was being built and it was something I had never attempted before. I stated it was being built from the foundation up, so it was open to change. In the second week, I added the Saturday Night Live cold open because it was appropriate to talk about the previous book and I thought we could use some humor before we dive down into the darkness. I said that humor was important to get us through the shadows with our flashlight. It was the only thing we had other than the flashlight, but of course, since we’re now on our sixth book, it seems time to retire that tradition. But The Bell Jar, which was the last thing we covered, took that exercise to its fully complete end.

This is a place where we dance with shadows; we move back and forth, up and down, around. We engage with them and we don’t hide from them in this place. That’s what leads us forward when we dip into the inner landscape, because when you dance with the shadows they get inside—it’s impossible sometimes to keep them out. At the beginning of the blog, I threw a few metaphors at you. I mean, this place isn’t called The Inner Landscape for no reason. And having a domain name like A Shadow Dancer is basically filled with metaphor itself. But both those examples are happily metaphorical for the reasons I just explained: to make the unknown more known, the ungraspable more graspable.

I told you the way I perceived to look at things when this whole thing started. It was going to be as the literature professor I had hoped to become before my own shadows tried to drag me into the darkness and they stayed. It was going to be using the skills that I had developed—starting at St. Petersburg Junior College with English studies, but developed further at Eckerd College and the Solstice MFA at Pine Manor. I adapted and went deep into the craft of the writing that I had only up to then been engaging with in an analytical form. And then I told you I would see it as someone who understood shadows infinitely; who saw them in front of me and around me as companions I didn’t want but walked alongside. Someone who knew the forest and walked the desert of darkness for 40 straight years.

And I told you we would do this together because it’s stronger that way, but we would do it the way I had adapted to do it. It’s just my sense of humor. It’s just what’s gotten me through everything. The primary example is telling someone I’m not feeling well—in the past I would say, “I’ll actually, if I can’t handle it anymore, take a really big running start before I jump and leap headfirst out my bedroom window.” And of course, the joke being that my bedroom window is on the first floor. It’s humor that’s developed through decades of wandering the mental darkness. More importantly, a humor that’s helped me to survive. As the manifesto says for this place—Viktor Frankl—even just a tiny few seconds of humor is enough to keep you going.

II. The journey through the windows

And so that was the plan of the blog. You, me, a flashlight, and shadows as we wandered our way through all of these things. I picked books apart using all three of those different angles. Sometimes more than others, focusing on one, sometimes all three at once, just going with what seemed appropriate depending on the book. With the books we’re dealing with and I’ve dealt with so far, it is not an easy journey no matter how much humor we have. We’ve read six books actually now if you’ve been with me from the start, but the journey is so much deeper. The darkness is so much more vast. It’s not for everyone, but it’s always been my belief that looking into the shadows and walking through the forest helps us understand.

It’s why I talked about how fiction gives us a window into lives. It’s why I kicked us off with the book that didn’t seem to have really much or frankly any humor in it at all: William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. But it did most assuredly have a window into the soul of three very different people: Milton, Helen, and Peyton Loftis. And Peyton, tortured by her family and her own shadows, desperately saw a window and looked out of it, at the potential of a better place. But when Peyton was looking outside the window, she was really looking inside of herself. Ultimately, being incapable of retaining all of the pain that she underwent, she saw in the grace of the birds something she couldn’t attain—calm, peace, joy. Peyton opened that window and she jumped out to bond with the birds, to join them in their flight. I said in that essay Peyton couldn’t fly. None of us can.

But it’s why at the end I also said we don’t have to fly. We just need to look through the windows to see the stories they’re telling us. To understand. No matter how smudged and dirty they are, we can learn so much by glancing through them. Yes, Peyton jumped to attempt to fly. She jumped out of the window, but as I said, windows are also reflections that we can see ourselves in our own inner journeys.

Our next book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, however, used windows as trapdoors. We discovered pretty early with Toru and his ironing and spaghetti that shadows can take on different meanings. When Toru looked at his window, everything looked fine. But we learned in the world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that in literature there is one similar replication often found: the center cannot hold. So Toru’s life was shaken up and he had to enter a well—the window, actually, being underneath him. A many-fathomed, very lonely place where spaghetti and ironing were useless, and the only voice was his own, which was not enough as he remained quiet to listen to the bird as it wound down. And we began to discover sometimes you have to do the work yourself, as hard as it is, for as long as it takes.

After Lie Down in Darkness and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, we shifted our angle. We had spent two weeks asking what happens when the shadows come for you—when they stalk you, wrap around you like a coat you can’t shrug off. So this time we asked a different question: what happens when people go looking for the shadows on purpose? Was it intentional or not? What happens when you make the call to seek the darkness on your own?

So we turned to The Secret History. We talked about Julian, the little vicious nightmare hobbit masquerading as a professor. We talked about Donna Tartt telling us on page one that a murder happened, then tying us to a chair and making us sit through 500 pages on the edge of our seats ourselves, desperate to find out why. We talked about how no one realized just how much she clearly adored The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And by the end, we discovered the truth: when you seek destruction, even under the banner of what seems the most heightened beauty, the erosion is inevitable.

So then we asked the inevitable next question: if all these corrupt, brilliant, unhinged little monsters were already in college, what happens if we get to someone before they’re corrupted? Since all the kids in The Secret History were already doomed by the time they hit college, we dropped down a level—the high school. We’re talking about A Separate Peace, with John Knowles stapling biblical symbolism to the narrative with all the subtlety of a freshman who had just discovered metaphor. My brain was foggy when I wrote this part of the night and during these 19 weeks that seem like they’re never going to end—so the character names had slipped a bit, but you know who I mean: the protagonist who narrates the whole thing, annoyed because he can’t study, irritated because his friend keeps pestering him, and completely unaware as a result that he’s already doomed.

Honestly, this section was a mess. But so were they. Still, we learned things. We learned that John Knowles does, in fact, have a sense of humor. He must. I refuse to believe the ski troop subplot could possibly be meant seriously. I simply refuse. And even if it was, God help us, we still got Blitzball, which is so bizarre it circles back around to being delightful.

And then I asked the question that’s been haunting me for weeks: can a writer know too much about their own source material? Which is how we ended up in the world of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. And we ripped off the Band-Aid. I had to give a trigger warning. And oh, did we discover lots of things there.

III. I always knew I knew more than my college professor

When I was in college, I took a 20th-century literary theory course. Each week we would read the same books, but then I’d have to read the literary theory on them. I remember The Tempest and The Awakening—something that greatly appalled the professor because they had replaced Katherine Anne Porter with The Awakening, and she was definitely not a fan.

So each week we would read these various literary theories and then see how they looked at each book through that lens. Now as we developed later into the course, it started to get even darker than shadows. Postmodern structuralism is about as dark as anything you can possibly conceive of; I remember calling out how depressing it is. And frankly, whichever one it was that tried to convince me that the writer doesn’t even know what they’re saying remains so bizarre to me to be incalculable. I refuse to figure out which one it was because it’s just a dumb thing. I just know anything that’s got “Post” in front of it, I detested. But I settled on mine pretty early: Reader-Response.

It sits at the center of how I read, how I write, and how I understand literature. Reader-Response is the one that always has made the most sense to me. It says that a book is not a fixed object. It is a living thing that changes depending on who is reading it, when they are reading it, and what they bring with them when they open the first page. Reader-Response says the text is only half the story. The other half is the reader. The book gives you the words, but you give it the meaning. You bring your history, your wounds, your fears, your humor, your memories, and yes, your shadows. And the book meets you where you are. That is why a book you loved at 16 can devastate you at 30. It’s not that the book has changed—it hasn’t. You have.

And that is exactly what happened to me with The Bell Jar.

IV. The manual, the map, and such deep regret

It wasn’t just a novel. It became a mirror. It became a map. It became a warning. It became a record of what happened when the world fails you at every level. And because of Reader-Response, it didn’t just tell me what happened to Esther Greenwood. It told me something about myself. It told me something about the systems we still live under that I have witnessed with such a deep and immense pain these past 19 weeks as I have stood in my own darkness, totally incomplete and alone. It told me something about the shadows that follow us and the ones we go looking for without realizing it.

About the person who was reaching out for me with their hand, asking me to help them, but I didn’t see it then, I didn’t know it then, I didn’t understand it then. And so it didn’t work. It didn’t work for them clearly because they are no longer with us. When you get a feeling to reach out for someone because, even though you don’t know why, you feel a certain way for them because the shadows have left scars on you so deeply you don’t know how to care about people, but you know that’s the one person that just maybe seemed, just maybe, to actually think it could work and you want to reach out and you discover they’re not here anymore… you carry with you the guilt. How do you come back from that?

And when you ask for help as someone who has never asked for help—when you had your first stroke and couldn’t walk—you still had your humor because you looked at your cat after falling upon waking and trying to walk and you said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it again. I’m not a cartoon character.” But you went back to bed because you didn’t want to deal. Not that you were scared. You didn’t feel like dealing with it then. And when you woke up and you called the nurse line and you still didn’t want to go, the way you bargained was to say, “I can’t go. I’ve got my Grinch pajamas on. They’ll get blood on them or mess them up somehow.” And that’s what you used to bargain until she convinces you that they won’t do anything unless you tell them to take your Grinch pajamas off. Because that’s the way that you face everything. You’re the Terminator, you don’t need anyone. So when you ask for help and no one answers, silence screams louder than anything on this planet that can possibly make the noise.

That is why the blog broke for a while after The Bell Jar. I broke for a while after The Bell Jar. Because of someone I once cared about. Because of someone I think maybe now could’ve been that person. And no matter how you want to put it, when you’re in the shadows and when you’re alone and when no one comes to put their arms around you and just tell you it’s going to be okay… it hurts. It wasn’t because the book was too heavy. It was because the book demanded something from me. It asked me to look at the places where this fucking world still hasn’t changed. It asked me to look at the places where I still haven’t changed. It asked me to go to the places that were always there…who then failed me at my lowest when I needed them the most.

V. Seeing my name on a tombstone

If The Bell Jar was the manual for how a person collapses under the weight of the world that refuses to see them, Pedro Páramo is the map of what happens after the collapse. It is a novel built out of graves, out of whispers, out of voices that should not be speaking, but do. It is a book where the dead talk more clearly than the living. Something I can certainly feel so profoundly now more than I ever thought I would or could understand. It is a book where the shadows are not symbols, but very clearly characters.

And it fits perfectly into the question we have been asking all along: what happens when people go looking for the darkness? Because in Pedro Páramo, the protagonist does exactly that. He goes searching for a father he never knew, and instead he finds a town full of ghosts. He finds out that sometimes the thing you’re searching for is the thing that destroys you. Pedro Páramo is one of those books that feels simple until you try to explain it. It expects you to follow it into the dark without bringing a flashlight and without any humor.

VI. The graveyard of voices

Pedro Páramo is one of those books that feels simple until you try to explain it. Then you realize there is no simple way to describe a novel where the dead talk, the living barely exist, and time folds in on itself like a crumpled piece of paper. It is a book that refuses to behave. It is a book that expects you to follow it into the dark.

The story begins with a promise. A son goes to find his father. But in Pedro Páramo, the promise is already broken before the journey even begins. The father is dead. The town is dead. The only thing still alive is the memory of what happened, and even that is decaying. Comala is a place where the past never left. It sits on top of the present like a weight. The people who once lived there are trapped in their own stories, repeating them, whispering them, confessing them, unable to move on.

It becomes a graveyard of voices. Every chapter is another ghost telling you what happened or what they think happened. The truth is scattered across the pages like bones. You have to piece it together yourself. You have to listen to the dead and decide which ones are telling the truth even when it hurts. Pedro Páramo himself is barely a character in the traditional sense. He’s a shadow that stretches across the entire book. He is the reason the town died. The novel shows you the aftermath of destruction—the echo of it. The residue.

VII. The story of consequences

The deeper you move into Comala, the more you realize that Pedro Páramo is not a story about ghosts. It’s a story about consequences. Every voice you hear is the result of something someone did, or didn’t do, or refused to see. The town is dead because the people in it were trapped in the orbit of one man’s power, and the novel forces you to listen to the aftermath. The residue of cruelty. The echo of choices that can’t be undone. The silence that registers when no one arrives to help.

Comala is a place where time doesn’t move forward. It loops. It repeats. The dead tell their stories over and over because they never got to finish them while they were alive. They confess, they complain, they whisper, they accuse. And the protagonist, who arrives expecting answers, finds only fragments. He finds pieces of a truth that no one person can tell. He finds a town where everyone knows part of the story but no one knows all of it.

And that is the brilliance of the novel. It refuses to give you a single narrator you can trust. Instead, it gives you a chorus of voices, each one carrying a piece of the truth, and it asks you to assemble the story yourself. It asks you to understand that the dead are not speaking for entertainment. They are speaking because they were never heard when they were alive.

This is where the book ties back to everything we’ve been exploring. In Lie Down in Darkness, the shadows came for the characters whether they wanted them or not. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the shadows were surreal. In The Secret History, the characters went looking for the shadows on purpose. In A Separate Peace, the shadows were already forming long before adulthood. In The Bell Jar, the shadows were internal, suffocating, and personal. Pedro Páramo is what happens when the shadows become the world itself. When the darkness is not metaphorical but literal. When the consequences of one person’s actions ripple outward until they swallow an entire town.

VIII. What do we carry back?

By the time we reached the end of this journey, after the shadows, after the collapse, after the ghosts, after the graves, the question we started with has changed. We began by asking what happens when the shadows come for you. Then we asked what happens when you go looking for them. Then we asked what happens when they get inside you. Then we asked what happens when the world itself becomes the shadows. But now, at the end, the question becomes something else entirely: what do we carry with us when we walk back out?

Every book in this series has left something behind. Lie Down in Darkness left the weight of inherited pain. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle left the surreal reminder that the subconscious is not a place you can visit without consequences. The Secret History left the truth that beauty and destruction often walk hand in hand. A Separate Peace left the ache of innocence cracking under pressure. The Bell Jar left the map of a mind under siege. Pedro Páramo left the echo of a world where the dead speak louder than the living.

And together, they form a single arc. A single descent. A single exploration of what it means to live with shadows, to seek them, to fear them, to understand them, and to be shaped by them. Literature matters because it shows us the parts of ourselves we don’t always want to see. It shows us the shadows we pretend aren’t there. It shows us the wounds we thought had healed. It shows us the ghosts we carry. It shows us the graves we walk over without realizing it. It shows us when the world gives us back nothing but 19 straight weeks of silence. It shows us the places where we break, but also the places we refuse to break.

Epilogue: The window was badly cracked, but it didn’t shatter

Each book demanded a different tone. Each book demanded a different version of me. Serious. Surreal. Playful. Mocking. Collapsed. And now: raw, messy, haunted. Reader-Response tells us that a book becomes what we bring to it. And what I brought to these books was 19 weeks of exhaustion, collapse, humor, anger, grief, curiosity—making me stay longer than I intended to, but with the stubborn refusal to look away from the dark. They spoke back. They shaped the writing. They shaped the tone.

So now, at the end of this piece, we step back from the shadows. Not because they’re gone, but because we’ve listened. Because we’ve walked through the darkness and come out with something we didn’t have before. A map. A manual. A chorus of voices. A reminder that the shadows are not always the enemy. Sometimes they are the story.

As I have long wandered the desert, writing has been my salvation and my sanctuary. And it will continue to be so. When I planned and launched this blog, it was always my hope to get to the point where I could do it more than once a week. I answered the bell as best as I could until The Bell Jar ripped at me and knocked me to my knees. But I shall answer despite being alone. I’m not fucking going anywhere. It was always my intention to do the blog in a sort of cycle format to have various books lead into the next.

So I’m proud to announce that the blog is moving to twice a week every Tuesday and every Friday. It may sound odd after going dark, but not really. Writing has always been my salvation and I choose to lean in rather than disappear. To not become just another haunted voice you heard from the graveyard.

If you read this far, if you’re out there, nothing’s going to change. If you’ve read this far you know we don’t swap Pinterest recipes in these parts. Fo r those interested: I reread these books for each piece and I go through multiple versions. I am a writer. This one clearly is going to be more raw than any of the others, but it’s more necessary. I’m also going to begin announcing at the beginning of the month the plans for what I’ll be doing for each month, so on Friday, I’ll be announcing what I’ll be covering for the next Tuesdays and Fridays through the end of the month. Although, you’ll be pleased to know a bit more humor is on the horizon.

I appreciate it greatly—especially if you’ve stuck with me. If you’re out there and you have stuck around I’m greateful, it means more than you know. Doing this has been a total enjoyment for me. I hope maybe for a few folks out there too.

I will see you all on Friday when we cover Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming. The new cycle of the blog as we move into a different direction, but continue tracking the inner landscape and those pesky shadows with our flashlight as we always have.

And my window is dirty and badly cracked. But when I look out through it I can still just make out something. It’s saying:

Onward.

---

The Saturday Night Live Cold Open.

This blog began by stating we’d be walking through the darkest of shadows, but with a flashlight to lead the way and a bit of humor to make the unsettling darkness a bit easier to navigate. In our first book, Lie Down in Darkness, we detailed the blog’s concepts. Fiction gives us windows. The windows allow us to look through different places and see different things—to stare at different possibilities and to look into different minds. But sometimes they also give us reflections, and serve as mirrors for ourselves. That’s why the spot here is called The Inner Landscape, and that’s what we dwell on here in this particular realm.

Styron’s book was a tough one but necessary. It was our foundation—the map we’d be using throughout our journey. Then we moved on to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where we still had windows, but they served as a trap door. For those who had begun the journey with us and wondered where our humor was, you were reminded that this journey is always rocky, and sometimes we might stumble, which will leave a few scars. We can make the walk through the shadows with a flashlight more bearable and survivable, but it is still the dark.

The next book, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, sought out a new land—one where we didn’t have the darkness trying to seek us out, but what happened when someone actually purposely sought it out on their own by design. Tartt’s book, a masterful Gothic haunting through the colleges of the eighties, definitely turned out not pretty, despite claiming to be viewing the picturesque. So then we wondered if we could get to people that had a potential to be consumed by darkness—what would happen getting to them before their innocence was entirely lost? We looked at John Knowles‘ A Separate Peace.

We’re going to continue to hunt and seek out the darkest of shadows, carrying our flashlight and trying to find moments of amusement. But now we return to those not hunting shadows willingly, and are diving down to the most deepest of levels. By circling back to Lie Down in Darkness, where Peyton Loftis jumped out the window seeking to fly.

It’s time to look at Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar to see if it’s truly possible, when haunted by shadows: is it always the decision to jump out the window yourself. Or is it possible to be pushed?

Part One: The appliance joke.

At the end of last week’s post, I spent time betting against myself on whether I could avoid a household appliance joke. But Sylvia Plath herself makes that a losing wager. Writing about her is like trying to repair a 1953 Frigidaire while the kitchen is on fire and the manual is written in code. In the world of The Bell Jar, women were expected to be as functional and silent as a toaster—plugged in, polished, and ready to pop out a perfect slice of domestic bliss on command. But Plath wasn’t a toaster; she was a high-voltage industrial engine forced into a breadbox. By the time we get to her New York City internship, the Golden Girl mask isn’t just cracking—its short-circuiting.

Part Two: The encroaching sunset.

I also stated last week: can a writer know too much about their source material? Usually, I like to let the work speak for itself for two reasons. One, academics can go too far—take a college literature course to find out if you have any questions about that. Discover how trees have bizarre meanings or clothes worn have intended meanings no person can foresee. On the other hand, as a writer who sometimes likes to posit thoughts and questions in their work, I can be mystified by what people don’t see, as well as what they think they do.

With Sylvia Plath, the work and the woman are so tangled up it is impossible to pull one string without unraveling the other. For the first time on the blog, we’re going to perform multiple autopsies—diving into the airless rooms of The Bell Jar while simultaneously looking at the life of the woman who wrote it, testing the theory that sometimes knowing the truth behind the fiction makes the story even more haunting. And then we’re going to turn the flashlight out completely. Or maybe we’ll actually train it on ourselves.

Part Three: It was a man’s man’s world, and it still is.

It is one of history’s great ironies that Sylvia Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, spent decades trying to curate her ghost and manage her memory, only to find himself relegated to the role of a footnote in her legacy. He was the established star of the time, the one with the titles and the traditional power, writing those important man-works of poetry. The truth today is that nobody cares jack shit of his work. There is only the persistent, ugly rumor that Hughes did more than just curate Plath’s final days; he performed his own brand of surgical editing on her journals to ensure his side of the story—that masculine, sweaty male version—was the only one that survived.

While it’s true that no one is responsible for another person’s suicide—you can’t pull the trigger or turn the gas dial for someone else—you can certainly spend a lifetime making the air inside the The Bell Jar unbreathable. He might have spent his nineties as a Poet Laureate, but in the court of public memory, he’s been demoted to a dustbin. He tried to hide the truth in the oven with her, but the cream always rises, and Plath’s voice is the only one we still hear ringing.

Trigger warning: It’s time to pull off the bandaid.

Part Four: The blog point where we’re hitting the mental illness, wandering the dark desert part.

We can’t talk about Plath without talking about the exit door she eventually took.

As someone who has lived in the shadows of that particular geometry, I can tell you that suicide is rarely the lightning bolt people think it is. It’s more like a slow leak. It’s the result of an environment where the clinical air has become unbreathable.

I once knew a woman who handed me a complete instruction manual. But I wasn’t equipped or able to read it at that time or in that particular moment. It was a trilogy—her own map of sorts—one of structure and safety. She was laying out a request for total power: a TPE dynamic that I simply didn’t have in me the necessary power to give or understand at that specific instance. Looking back at it now, through the airless rooms of Sylvia Plath’s world, I finally see it for what it was. It wasn’t about sex or wanting obsessive, dominant control. It was structure, it was certainty, it was a promise: just the moments of needing to be on the couch with someone’s arm around them that spoke more volumes than any words: you’re safe with me, and I’ll keep out the world’s dangers and, most importantly, I’ll keep out the darkness. It was about an anchor.

When the depression is heavy enough, the world becomes darkly bizarre: both claustrophobic and terrifyingly loose. Some people seek out a human being to become that frame. They seek a total power exchange, not out of a desire for subservience, but out of a desperate need to outsource their very own survival. They want someone else to take the wheel because they can no longer trust their own hands to steer. But here is the tragic geometry of the missed signal: you cannot be a harbor for someone else if you’re still a ship searching for the seafloor yourself, waves lapping over the sides from a violent, unyielding storm

Part Five: Missed signals.

Plath’s search for her own anchor didn’t start with Ted Hughes. It started with The Colossus. She had spent her career trying to reconstruct the ruined statue of her father, spending her days with gluepots and Lysol, trying to patch the cracks of a man who had been gone for decades. She was looking for a monument to own her reality. When she met Hughes, she thought she had finally found a living version of that statue—a Colossus who could provide the total power required to keep the Bell Jar from dropping entirely. But you can’t build a life inside the ear of a statue, and you certainly can’t find safety in a someone who is as broken as the very ruins you’re trying to escape.

The difference between survival and the descent often comes down to who is in the room with you. Plath had Dr. Gordon—a silk-tied specialist who didn’t listen and told her to buy new shoes while her world was turning gray. I’ve been thinking a lot about that contrast for this essay. When I look at a note I recently received from someone at my clinic. It was not a dismissive, simplistic statement of the shallow, but a handwritten reminder that I have a family there who enjoys seeing me on my good days but, ever more so importantly, wants me to know I can lean on them with total trust during the bad ones. One is a catalyst for the vacuum; the other a strong tether to the world.

Part Six: It’d be so great to have had more Plath writing, and also, if only I had known…

Sylvia Plath didn’t have a tether. She had a Colossus that crumbled in a world that wanted her to be a toaster. But she left us with a vital and important work of literature. The Bell Jar serves as a warning and must and should be read by all. It’s a surgical report from the inside of a short-circuiting brain, but more importantly, a short-circuiting life.

We owe it to her to read it—all of us. It’s a manual she left behind, even if it makes some of us bleed out much more deeply than others to do so.

Next Time: Must we take these looks into our own shadows? Indeed. For if we don’t, and we let the shadows swallow us—whether we may think by the hands of others or by our own—we will realize we eventually end up in our own actual graveyard. Next time, we look at Juan Rulfo and Pedro Páramo.

We move. We must. We march:

Onward.

(The Inner Landscape is taking a short break. Weekly posts will finally(!) resume April 24)

Intro: The Saturday Night Live Cold Open

Boy, did we need a break this week. The last three books were massive undertakings—the kind of reading that leaves you blinking at the wall afterward, wondering why you voluntarily buried yourself in this psychic sludge.

It started with William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, a book so deeply dark and airless it practically required a miner’s helmet. Then we followed Toru Okada down into his well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where the drip-drip-drip of the void becomes its own desolate soundtrack. Finally, because apparently we weren’t done courting the abyss, we wandered into The Secret History. In these books, darkness isn’t just something that happens to you; it’s a vocation.

To lighten things up this week, we needed something a little easier—to see if we could survive with someone who wasn’t damaged before they got to college. So we’re going to look at high school. But of course, it’s literature, and you’re visiting this specific location, so it’s clearly not going to turn out well. It doesn’t. Let’s look at John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Part I: Can you mow around cows?

People seem to forget what happens in childhood—the little battles that go on and on, occurring daily. They forget, especially if they were introverted in middle school, the feeling of being picked up by a larger kid with one hand just so he could open the locker with the other and shovel you inside. Eventually, it all fades away. They forget the magazines sitting under their beds that their parents weren’t particularly fond of, either. Everybody eventually reaches an age where they start looking at kids out the window and opening it just to scream—not “Nice catch,” but “Get the hell off my lawn!”

It’s some kind of strange, bizarre age amnesia. Or maybe it’s just the shell adulthood forms around you, whether things go great or not. Even if things go perfectly—you marry that girl you adored in high school, move out West with her, start a ranch with cows, have the 2.5 kids, and are deliriously happy—even you will eventually open the window, see a bunch of kids, and yell: “Get away from my cows! You look a bit drunk and I don’t want you tipping them.”

It’s just a part of life. People forget that everyone had these little battles. Sometimes they’re “stuck-in-a-locker” battles, but sometimes they’re battles with what’s inside. Forgetting them, however, is what leads you to Doom.

Part II: Yes, Jane Austen would be much more fun.

It is a truth universally acknowledged—and no, I’m not playing a practical joke; we’re not going to be talking about Jane Austen and having a blast—that readers prefer first-person narrators. They like someone telling them the story. But that’s a trap, one that talented writers use to their benefit. We learned last week that while Richard in The Secret History admitted he was a murderer, almost everything else he told us afterward was a lie. Here, Gene is giving us directions, but we have to ask: how truthful is he being?

At the beginning of the novel, he is afraid of visiting two places. John Knowles, as we will discover, is not the most subtle writer. Gene is afraid of a tree—a tree that holds the weight of the one in the Garden of Eden—and some marble steps. He hasn’t been physically harmed by either, but they set the dynamic: physical versus mental, inner versus outer.

Gene is the academic, the introverted reader. Finny is the athlete. We don’t know, based on Gene’s account, whether Finny ignores his academics because he’s uninterested or if he’s simply not good at them. Like everyone, Finny wants a best friend, but he wants that friend to do what he wants to do. They can be friends, but it’s going to be difficult if one doesn’t “give.” Unfortunately, one of them does—Gene—and that “giving” happens entirely within his own mind.

Part III: Maybe Tiffany was right and thinking “I Think We’re Alone Now” would be better.

Gene and Finny manage to get along because Gene never challenges him. He never says, “Wait, I want to stop and read.” Why Gene never simply asks for time to study, we don’t know. But in one way, we should be thankful he doesn’t—otherwise, this already slim novel would have been a short story.

Gene is trying to be helpful; even introverts want friends. But his submission is like when your partner pokes you and says, “Put the book down and watch the show with me,” or a doctor pokes you to fill out forms in the waiting room, or your partner pokes you while you’re reading in bed and says, “Let’s have sex now.” You can say no, but your relationship isn’t going to end well. So Gene wants to keep reading, but he puts the book down and does exactly what Finny wants.

Two events define the early days. The first is Blitzball—the stupidest game ever created, even in fiction, because it has no rules. You just throw a ball and tackle people, but nobody who wants the ball actually gets it, and the people who get the ball don’t want it. As I mentioned, Knowles isn’t being subtle: it’s telling us something much larger. We’ll get back to that.

The other event is the tree. All kids like climbing trees, but here, instead of biting the Apple, they decide to reach for it themselves. There is definitely going to be a fall. They form the Suicide Club, the most ironically named club in literature. Nobody will end up killing themselves in it—at least not yet, and not technically. But two people will die by their own hands in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Part IV: What was it that INXS meant about “Suicide Blonde”?

The Suicide Club becomes popular, but it cuts deep into Gene’s study time. So does assisting Finny with his non-academic endeavors. Then Finny breaks the school swimming record when only the two of them are at the pool, and he doesn’t want to tell anyone. Gene finds this fascinating—and terrifying. Is it deep, selfless admiration? Or is it like Henry in The Secret History, saving Richard’s life just to bond with him while actually ensnaring him in a trap? Gene chooses the latter. He suspects sabotage.

This is where the unreliable narrator comes in handy. One person might say, “My partner wants to cuddle after sex because they love me.” Another might say, “My partner wants to cuddle after sex just so I can’t get back to my book.” Does Finny actually want Gene to do well, or is he so wrapped up in his own inner world that he doesn’t have Gene’s best interests at heart?

In the end, it doesn’t matter, because John Knowles is a huge fan of An American Tragedy—just like me. So, let’s talk about that, shall we?

Part V: Did he or didn’t he? Talk about your cheating!

In An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths is obsessed with escape. Raised in a poor, religious family, he eventually stumbles upon a sweet young girl who finds him infectious; they become intimate. Then he meets a rich girl who plays a bit of cat-and-mouse with him, eventually inviting him into her world of wealth and illusion.

When the poor girl informs him she’s pregnant, Clyde’s new world is threatened. He takes her out on a boat with the clear intention to kill her—but things go awry. Did he actually mean to do it? Or did he try to save her when the boat rocked? The brilliance is that you can argue both ways. Despite critics claiming Theodore Dreiser was a “bad” writer from a technical perspective—An American Tragedy is often called the greatest “badly written” novel in existence—he manages to ask the hard question: Once Clyde took her out on that boat, was he already morally bankrupt?

Knowles achieves the same thing. Gene makes the branch move. Does Finny fall accidentally because the branch is rocking? We don’t know, even with Gene telling us. That is the first-person narrator at work. Just because someone tells us something doesn’t mean they know the truth themselves; we only have their interpretation. All we know is that it was an impulsive act. We don’t know how much Gene meant to harm him. What matters is that the branch rocked, Gene was holding the tree, and Finny fell.

Part VI: Who knows? Who cares? Actually, it is kind of important.

Gene visits Finny and tries to apologize, but Finny pushes it away. In his world, his best friend couldn’t possibly have meant to hurt him. The remainder of the book follows Gene feeling morally culpable for the “accident.” Summer turns to fall, and the novel matches the season, becoming colder and more brittle.

Brinker Hadley enters, insisting on order and discipline. Finny demands that Gene “take up the banner” for him regarding sports and begins training him for the Olympics. It’s a shared delusion—a way for Gene to do penance and for Finny to avoid the truth. They grasp each other in a massive bear hug because they know that if they release it, they’ll both be destroyed by the reality of the situation.

Meanwhile, the war is raging on.

You do remember there’s a war going on, right?

Part VII: I really could use an antidepressant.

For the first and only time in the novel, Knowles attempts humor. It’s the one thing he hasn’t unveiled up to this point. He also seems to be a fan of the Catch-22 logic. He sends Leper Lepellier—the school’s gentle outlier—off to the war after the boy sees a recruitment film for the ski troops. You might actually laugh in a way you wouldn’t have earlier in the novel, simply because Knowles doesn’t usually “do” humor. Even if the author meant it seriously, it’s so bizarre that it reads as a dark joke dropping out of nowhere.

This leads us into the arrival of deep winter. There is a brief respite before the damage starts to unravel: the Winter Carnival, a simple, shared world of joy and rebellion. But then it turns bitter. The sense of humor vanishes, and the telegram arrives: I have escaped and I need help.

Tell me about it.

When Gene visits Leper, we get a clear indication of the society they live in. It’s still pretty much the same society Knowles was writing about back then. Leper is mentally unraveling, seeing hallucinations. The military wants to dismiss him under Section 8. While technically a discharge for mental illness, society at that time viewed it as making a man “unemployable.” It was essentially worse than a dishonorable discharge. Violating military rules or committing a war crime—which would bring you a trial—was somehow seen as less problematic than having mental health issues as a result of the war. Talk about your Catch-22.

It feels like things haven’t really changed that much. But thankfully, they have. Mental health issues are much more appreciated now and supported without stigma. I mean… aren’t they?

---

Part VIII: I messed up, you’re messed up. Everybody’s messed up in this place.

Leper accuses Gene of being a “savage underneath”—an irony coming from a kid who spent the war looking at beaver dams. But Gene can’t face that truth. Like the characters in The Secret History, he has a moral rot. Once more, we reach the place where “the center cannot hold.” It hasn’t gone well in the previous three books, and it doesn’t here, either.

Brinker pushes for a reckoning—a ridiculous kangaroo trial in the assembly room. Gene’s denial collapses, and with it, Finny’s ability to accept the fall as an accident. Finny storms out, falls on the marble stairs, and re-breaks his leg.

In the infirmary, his haunting “Why?” echoes throughout the novel. That question penetrates everything. We discover that when dealing with the shadows, those questions are all too common. You realize then that Finny wasn’t competing; sports were just his way of trying to keep living.

In this moment, the term “Blood Brothers” has never meant more.

Part IX: Blitzball is still a stupid fucking game.

Finny goes into surgery to repair the fracture, and bone marrow slips into his heart. The less-than-subtle Knowles has returned: Finny dies, bringing a new, literal meaning to the term “Blood Brothers.” The war finally arrives at Devon—which is what the novel was actually about all along. Just like that stupid Blitzball game, there are no winners and no losers. Not in war, not in mental illness, and sometimes, not even in friendship.

Brinker’s father arrives to lecture the boys—one of the great irritants in literature—having fully succumbed to the Age Amnesia mentioned earlier with his absurd dictations on “honor.” The boys have already learned that Gene’s war with Finny was pointless.

No survivor can ever allow themselves to be swallowed up completely by the shadows. It always ends in destruction.

Next Week: we’ll find out that keeping things “light” doesn’t make it any easier to walk through the darkness. We’ll see what happens when a novelist knows a bit too much about their source material as we look at Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. We’ll see if I can get through the entire essay without making an appliance joke.

Really, what are the odds?

Onward.

The Saturday Night Live cold open:

Two weeks ago, in Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton took our hand and walked us straight into the long night’s ruin, swallowed whole by the dark. Last week, in The Wind‑Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami tried to keep us in the daylight for as long as possible — first with spaghetti, then with twelve‑step ironing, dictating each motion like a monk. But still, we lost our footing and tumbled into a well, listening to the slow, indifferent drip of water in the dark around us.

At some point, you start to wonder whether the darkness is hunting us — but, even more terrifying, what happens when someone starts sending love letters to the dark. Which is why today we turn to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a novel where beauty and rot are lovers, and where the descent isn’t a mistake but a calling.

Part One: Cool, You Killed Someone. Now What?

If we’d been able to witness Jay Gatsby in his college years, he might have emerged as Richard Papen. Gatsby wanders into his illusions like a man sleepwalking; Richard sprints toward his, arms wide, begging the dream to embrace him back. He wants the glamour, the brilliance, the curated strangeness. He wants to be devoured by it entirely.

The novel begins with Richard confessing to murder, then immediately pivoting into a litany of complaints about his youth. It’s a familiar pose. We’ve heard it before. Strip them both down to their bare essentials and Gatsby and Richard share one single truth:

They are both exquisitely, almost artistically, assholes.

Donna Tartt asks an awful lot of her reader right out of the gate. To open a 500-page behemoth of a debut novel by casually confessing to murder requires a staggering amount of structural confidence. In a way, it is the exact inverse of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Where Murakami made us wade through pages of mundane spaghetti-boiling and shirt-ironing before slowly peeling back the dread, Tartt sits the reader down on the opening page and ties them to a chair. Then she shows them the bloody knife and says, Now that you’re here, let’s talk about how we got here.

This is the great risk of the “whydunit” versus the “whodunit.” Standard mysteries rely on the cheap adrenaline of the reveal. By stripping that away instantly, Tartt bets the entire 500 pages on the psychological destruction of her characters. She isn’t writing a modern thriller. She is writing a Greek tragedy in tailored suits, where the descent isn’t a mystery—it’s an absolute inevitability.

First, we get Richard’s backstory, and it is revealed with one long, enormous sigh. He’s from California, complaining endlessly about his parents and his desperation to escape his father’s business. He spends two years at a local college—which, frankly, sounds like a perfectly healthy environment, even if they didn’t teach ancient Greek. But Richard picks up a knack for the language, and Greek becomes his escape hatch into something better. He seeks to entirely erase his past existence and speaks admirably of the reinvention. Though, the reader begins to wonder: if only he had actually paid attention to the literature instead of just the language. If Richard had just stumbled across Medea and understood what Greek tragedy actually entails, Donna Tartt wouldn’t have had a book.

This is where Tartt pulls off her greatest sleight of hand. Richard is technically a reliable narrator because he has already confessed to the murder. We trust him because he told us the worst thing upfront. But with every single breath he takes, we begin to realize he is completely unreliable in everything else. He is utterly blind to the fact that his life is racing toward an intersection. The stoplight definitely isn’t green, and it sure isn’t yellow—it is pulsing a bright, blood red. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to better your life; it’s a standard literary engine. But we immediately see within the first few pages that Richard lacks the basic moral guardrails to keep this train on the tracks. We want to reach inside the novel and strangle him.

It isn’t just the murder confession on page one that makes us uncomfortable; it’s the way Richard thinks. By the time he actually arrives at Hampden College, we are already deeply unsettled. We watch him obsess over the most insignificant things—the aesthetics of a tailored coat, the cold brilliance of an expensive pen—and we really want to scream, What is wrong with you? But of course, we can’t stop him. The deed is already done in the opening sentence.

When an author has you in the palm of her hand like that, she gets to do whatever she wants to you. For the next 500 pages, Tartt does exactly that. She drags us through the Greek rituals, letting us hear the Greek chorus in the background, the blood in the Vermont forest, and the company of staggeringly self-important students. At the end of it all, the characters bizarrely will be the only ones who won’t seem to care about the horror they brought to bear. But you, the reader, will feel very, very dirty.

After closing the book, your first immediate thought will be the need for a shower.

Part Two: Can You Please Mind Your Own Business?

It is entirely fitting that the moment Richard actually lays eyes on the Greek students, his fate is already sealed. Sure, we are going to get all the lurid details of the murder and the rituals later, but anyone paying attention to how pathetic and distressed Richard’s inner life is at the beginning can see the trap snap shut the second he sees them.

If books had lightbulbs, you could see one flash over Richard‘s head. He spent his entire youth desperate to escape the closed, suffocating circle of his California family, running away at warp speed the first chance he got. He hates closed circles. But the moment he arrives at Hampden, he realizes that simply getting to the expensive private college—hiding the financial aid forms, lying about his background, faking his history, faking the aesthetic of wealth—isn’t enough for him. Just being on campus doesn’t cure his imposter syndrome. There’s still the tenacious belief inside that he doesn’t belong and, more importantly, that he doesn’t matter.

Then he sees the Greek students. They are the ultimate closed circle. They are wealthy, eccentric, and entirely isolated from the rest of the school.

This is what immediately captivates Richard and lures him into destruction. It eats at him. He can’t just be happy at a private college reading books, learning, and spending time with the friends he claims he has. Once he sees that inner sanctum, the education becomes entirely irrelevant. He must possess the exclusivity. He must attain the circle, because only then will he truly belong.

He looks at a group of arrogant, detached, wildly damaged kids, and his only thought is: So clearly, I have no choice but to find a way to join them.

And then we meet the architect and master of the closed circle: Julian Morrow

Part Three: My God, More Lord of the Rings?

Julian is one of the most fascinating, insidious creatures in modern literature. If you knocked on the door of a Hobbit hole and a creature poked his head out who could fluently teach ancient Greek, that would be Julian. He’s the ultimate gatekeeper at Hampden College, guarding his hand-picked students like a dragon keeping its gold safe in a cave.

But structurally, he’s the exact inverse of golden Gandalf. When Gandalf knocks on your door and leads you out of the Shire and down a dark, terrifying journey, it’s ultimately for your own good. You’re going to save the world, build your character in the process, and be able to face the ultimate reality.

When this dastardly little Greek hobbit takes you down a dark journey, it is entirely to escape reality. He isolates his students, feeds their arrogance, and encourages them to lose their minds in ancient rituals just to see if they can. Gandalf leads you through the dark to get you home safely. Julian pours the Kool-Aid himself. He leads you into the dark, convinces you the rot is actually beautiful, and leaves you there for a much more disastrous, bloody ending.

Part Four: Perhaps the Fact He Seemed Like a Prick Should’ve Been Your First Clue.

Richard’s entry into the Greek class happens by a kind of selective accident-non-accident. Anyone who has been ensconced in reading Greek tragedy knows there are always “accidents” that are actually fate springing a trap for you. For Richard, the trap is stumbling upon the weirdly incestuous twins in the library and helping them translate a passage with which they’re struggling.

And then in comes Henry Winter, the self-appointed, staggeringly arrogant leader of the group, who gives Richard a patronizing “good job” and immediately dismisses him. His cold calculation, demonstrated not with subtlety but outright hostility, could have been something Richard might have picked up on—and clearly should have picked up on. But instead, the harsh, curt dismissal hooks directly into Richard’s deep insecurities and crawls under his skin. It acts as a parasitic infection that attaches to his body and can only be cured with entrance into the circle. He is now desperate to be let in, and it must be so. Otherwise, he can’t be cured.

And then, of course, there is Bunny.

Bunny is the weirdest character of all. And that is quite a statement when dealing with a novel where a desperate young man covets entry into an inner sanctum, and where the centerpiece of the plot is a literal bacchanal in the forest. Yet Bunny comes across as the weird one. We already know he gets killed—which makes him interesting right off the bat—but he is also morbidly, exquisitely annoying. As you read, you will catch yourself thinking: Frankly, I’m glad they killed you. I would have, too. I don’t like you either. He is the ultimate grifter. He is that horrible friend who attaches himself to you every time you announce a visit to a restaurant, and then eats, and eats, and eats some more. Just as the bill is brought to the table, he excuses himself to the bathroom and sneaks out the back door. Honestly, who hasn’t secretly wanted to kill the dine-and-dash friend?

But herein lies the great irony of The Secret History. The problem isn’t just that Bunny is an obnoxious mooch. The problem is that Bunny is the only one in the group who actually sees the real world.

He doesn’t take the Greek rituals seriously. He knows the entire thing is just a wealthy, pretentious cosplay game. He sees the absolute hideousness of what they are doing and what they are capable of. He is the only one who isn’t completely wrapped up and hypnotized by Julian‘s cult of beauty. But in a group that demands absolute devotion to the illusion—as all cults must—the one guy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is the one who has to die.

Part Five: If Only You Had Bought a Coat.

Richard’s desperation to belong to this closed circle is so absolute that it nearly kills him long before the murder even happens. Over the winter break, because he has nowhere else to go and refuses to admit he is broke, he ends up staying in a freezing, unheated room with a hole in the roof. He is so committed to his curated illusion of wealth, so terrified of being exposed as an imposter to the Greeks, that he would literally rather freeze to death in a brutal Vermont winter than ask for help.

And then comes the rescue from the absolute last person you would expect. Henry Winter—the cold, calculating, staggeringly arrogant leader of the pack—is the one who finds him, rescues him, and takes him to the hospital, saving his life.

It’s a brilliant, terrifying psychological trap on Tartt’s part. Henry has never before demonstrated being the type to care if someone freezes to death. In fact, one theorizes he would find it somehow aesthetically poetic. But importantly, by saving Richard’s life, Henry binds him forever. Richard is now not just a hanger-on; he’s indebted. He owes Henry. Everyone else would feel the exact same way. However, such things are problematic when the one you’re indebted to happens to be a sociopath. Now Richard has a switch he carries around on his chest just waiting for Henry to activate it. And clearly, obviously, naturally—this is literature, and you’re in the sweet spot of this blog—it’s going to be pushed at the worst possible moment.

But now it’s time to take a break and talk of horror films. Because why not.

Part Six: Donna Tartt Has a Massive Crush on Leatherface.

There are numerous horror films about people who go into the woods. They go into the woods to camp. They go into the woods to have sex. They go into the woods to camp and have sex. And of course, there are plenty of monsters one always stumbles upon in the woods.

If you’re not in a truly dark horror film where absolutely no one gets out alive—and by the way, congratulations if you are, because you’re probably watching an independent horror film and the world could use many more of those because their often the best—then at least one person makes it back from the group. Sometimes two, a male and a female, if they’re aiming for the younger crowd. But everybody else just gets gutted, shredded, and killed rapidly, and depending on how much special effects money was available to the studio, graphically. Everybody gets left behind in the forest a bloody carcass.

Look at The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a particular example. Poor Sally runs for the last fifteen minutes of the film. Screaming. No, literally, the last fifteen minutes are her screaming continuously. For justifiable reasons—you would too if an individual wearing a mask made from other people’s faces was chasing you with a chainsaw to add yours to his collection. (Note: after they use your body to help with their meatpacking, which is kind of a “don’t waste anything, use everything” philosophy. It’s an ecological horror film, who knew?) She gets cut by tree limbs and scratched. She jumps out of a window, lands pretty well, and keeps running. She is determined to make it away from him and out of that forest no matter what. She is going through pure hell, both an inner and outer hell, to survive Leatherface.

When she finally makes it to the road and hops into the back of the pickup truck, we see her face as it’s pulling away, and we know everything. If we hadn’t figured it out already by what she was going through, or if you had some fond hopes that she would be okay when the credits rolled, the final shot confirms everything. The woman is going to be in therapy the rest of her life. While she is saved, she definitely is not well at all.

The Secret History is even worse. A bunch of jaded, pompous, annoying kids who think they can do anything they want by fiat—which, by the way, is also a horrible idea in horror films—wander into the forest. But the terrifying difference here is that all of them come back. And none of them were even good before they entered the forest; now they’re even worse. They are definitely not remotely okay after the events that occurred.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster: who will survive and what will be left of them?

And Donna Tartt doesn’t have a chainsaw anywhere to be found in the entire 500 pages.

Part 7: Ain’t That What Friends Are For?

After Leatherface unfortunately lets everyone escape, we have the group back from that bacchanal. They all agree, as cults do, to hide what happened—although the way things work, since they’re all rich, they probably would be able to get really good lawyers. But this is when they become a completely closed-off circle. They share this horrible secret, and anyone not involved in it is not a part of their world. The complicity they took part in, the fear they share, the claustrophobia that starts to seep in out of the secrets they are keeping.

Look at that. We’ve discovered the title of this one. Just like with Murakami, eventually, we can find out why a book is called something, even if you aren’t an English literature major. The group is sharing their secret history, but also the secret history of what they’ve done, and the representation of the twisted ecstasy of the Greeks that they were trying to attain.

The problem being, of course, since they are all now closed off together and have built an inner wall to share things with, one person is missing: Bunny. And whether or not Bunny would have gotten in on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and wanted to dine-and-dash in the forest, he knows something’s off here, and he doesn’t like it.

So, his jokes become vicious and sharp. We suddenly start to see Henry become pale and pull out of himself, while Bunny actually seems to jump to be the powerful one of the group. Which is odd, because he wasn’t even the one involved in the activity.

Henry does become the architect of the cover-up, and the others go along because they’re terrified. But they give up their complete autonomy to him just to escape any sense of responsibility for what they’ve done. Individually, they all collapse.

Charles is the first to go because he becomes a drunk. Alcohol is his coping mechanism. He is the defining instance of that very not-good term: self-medicating. I suppose when you’ve gone to the forest to re-create a Greek tragedy and come out wearing sheets of metaphorical blood, self-destruction probably does seem like a relief.

Camilla withdraws. She becomes quieter. She becomes the most emotional of the group and is basically the one you see in a film who would wake up every night from a nightmare of what they have done.

And Francis is the one most plagued by mental health issues, getting panic attacks, with the fear and the walls seemingly closing in to trap him. He is the one who actually feels the consequences and what they might mean. He is the moral guideline in a group that doesn’t have one.

The problem is, by not inviting Bunny, it’s now Bunny who’s going to have to enter the circle. And by doing so, once again, we are back exactly where we were after our first two books: we reach the point in literature, and in this blog, where the center can no longer hold. Are you starting to sense a trend?

Part 8: Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater.

Bunny is kind of a problem. We already know that. The problem is he knows something, but he doesn’t know exactly what.

Bunny is like having that friend—and it may have been a best friend—who has always told you that your partner is a piece of trash, and you’ve just always tried to ignore them. I mean, they’re a friend that you like, but you also like your partner. And then one day they walk into your house and they say, “I want you to hear this,” and they play a tape, and it’s your husband or your wife, your girlfriend or your boyfriend, and they’re having sex on the tape, and it’s not with you.

You clearly know a lot more, but you still don’t know why. And why were they fucking you over?

So Bunny, not appreciating having taken place in… well, literally, if we are kind of talking about what happened in the forest and the Dionysian kind of Greek orgy—now there’s a vision, isn’t it one?—he turns his innocence into a weapon because he doesn’t really understand what is at stake. And because everyone is so unsettled, every punch lands.

Ironically, the one who was looked down upon by the group, who was considered least worthy by the others—and frankly, with legitimate reasons in a few cases—is the one that will lead to their destruction. He’s now in a position where he can humiliate Henry, puncture Charles, really say some nasty stuff to the twins (and by the way, did I mention the twins are incestuous? It comes up at this point, but we survived Leatherface and that’s already enough, so let’s just move along), and then he begins draining Richard for money without absolutely any remorse.

And since they’re spoiled little rich brats, and they don’t want to take responsibility for what they’ve done, they start fearing him more than they do the truth. Every interaction is like a trapdoor waiting for them to fall through. But since we know what happened on the first page, now we can see it as Bunny upon the stage, the noose around his neck, and we’re thinking: Is this finally the thing that’s gonna move the floor where he hangs?

So they rationalize the unthinkable, which frankly isn’t that far, you know, when you’ve decided to play Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the forest for fun. They play more on the title: Bunny becomes the secret history they can’t keep covered.

In a sense, at least to the circle, Bunny becomes part of the Greek tragedy. His fate is simply destined. It’s a choice. He must die because he’s being pulled by his own actions of threatening to reveal what it was they had done.

It’s clear to the characters. We see them realizing it, and it’s far more inevitable—ignoring that we know what happened on the first page—long before anyone actually states it out loud.

And then Bunny is dead. If nothing else, Donna Tartt didn’t lie. She said it on the first page.

Part 9: What the Hell Did You Claim on your Taxes?

There are two problems with Julian. One: he’s an extraordinary teacher. Two: remember when the counselor told us he only took a dollar for tax purposes? He was vastly overpaid.

Julian senses something is wrong and the group is fraying at its edges, but it’s an inconvenience and an aesthetic flaw, not a moral crisis. He won’t even name it or speak of it, and he never seems to show any human emotion. He’s entirely abstract, preferring beauty to truth. Even as everything is starting to rot.

His detachment is so vile it becomes a form of brutality in itself.

He is hurt in the only way he’s willing to be—like he’s holding a snow globe that has been broken, and now the inner portion has been ruined. Not that what’s inside the snow globe mattered. But that now it’s deeply and forever cracked and unrepairable.

It’s more about the ugliness than about the loss of a student. When he finds out what happens to Bunny, he just recoils—not from any ethical feeling. And if your students go into the forest to replicate The Texas Chain Saw Massacre because of what you taught them, and you don’t feel any guilt, clearly you don’t have any ethics.

Julian‘s collapse and lack of morality is one of the most epic of any in modern American literature. He taught his students, they learned far too well, and when he sees himself in the mirror and what they’ve done, he doesn’t like the reflection. Because there’s no beauty there.

His refusal to accept responsibility howls through the book in its silence.

Julian is the father driving the family in the RV to Disney World of a sort, and he’s had far too many. He crashes it. He kills everybody else in the other car, and he flees into the night. Like any drunk driver, doing so serves as his confession.

They carry the weight of the philosophy that he was instilling into them. He builds up the world that destroys them and pretends that he was not involved. He taught them to worship beauty—or beauty of a sort—and he lays out the path and just seems offended that they marched the steps. Not devastated. He’s offended. Not heartbroken. Inconvenienced. Not guilty, just gone.

Ghosts haunt all the books that we have looked at so far. Peyton Loftis haunted William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, haunting the entire novel and finally flying out the window. Toru goes down into a well that haunts The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but it finally leads to show him the way. Here, Julian haunts The Secret History.

He floats through the novel, Richard grasping onto him for all that he offers, and then vanishes like all ghosts do. But in its place, his visage is present in every ruin left behind, while being absent from every consequence.

Julian taught about the luxury and power found in beauty. Richard Papen is right in his statement on the very first page: in this novel, beauty is very much the fatal flaw entirely.

Next week, we’re going to give ourselves a break with a slightly shorter work. But we’re going to stay on focus and see if we can catch people before they get to college. We’re going to deal with boarding schools and high schools. So you can probably imagine it’s not going to go well, or you wouldn’t be here. We’ll take a look at John Knowles’ A Separate Peace.

Onward.

The Saturday Night Live Cold Open

We began our descent last week by looking through the window with Peyton Loftis in William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. If you came here straight from the energetic-by-comparison promises of the “About Me” section and the Manifesto, you’re owed a deep apology.

But this place was always about walking through the dark with a flashlight so that we saw the shadows and could laugh and be amused as we continued our way through. But it’s still the darkness, and sometimes we trip and fall, and that always leaves scars. So we couldn’t lay the foundation for this space without starting out in the very deepest depths of the dark. If you don’t want to experience any of the night at all, it’s best to exit now. (Please use the stairs, though, not the window.)

Peyton chose to open her window and jump out to meet the birds and fly. Which she could not do. Our next book features a bird, but its window operates more like a trapdoor. And there is a window, but the really scary part is when our protagonist looks out of it, and everything seems perfectly fine. Of course, we’re talking about literature, so it’s clearly not going to be. Even more, since you’re here, you know it’s not going to be.

But we’re gonna keep this one light and funny for as long as possible, and that’ll be right up until we hit the well.

Part 1: Toru’s Hymn Book

Toru begins his morning with spaghetti and classical music with the rigor and determination of someone who knows it will keep the world from shifting under his feet. Routine is his religion. There’s nothing wrong with that; everyone’s got their religion. And even if your leader leads you to South America, it could be okay. But if he asks you to drink Kool-Aid, that’s another story. So Toru‘s pot boils. The music plays. The day is supposed to unfold in its usual manageable shape. And while routine is not Kool-Aid, it is a fragile God at times, and all it takes is a phone ringing at the wrong moment to expose the seams.

But in literature, there are just certain things. So ironing and spaghetti are far more important than you might think. There must possibly be a reason why he is opening the novel with spaghetti, especially when it’s going to eventually and shortly lead to ironing. You can hear first-time readers now: This person is always on the bestseller list?

A woman calls and asks for just 10 minutes of his time. 10 minutes. Not eight or nine, not 11 or 12. But 10. It’s an oddly precise request. Toru is startled as he tries to explain he’s cooking spaghetti, which is not something most people feel they need to see as their hill to die on, even if it is 10:30 in the morning. But the woman isn’t interested in the spaghetti. She wants the 10 minutes. And for Toru, we’ve reached that point, as we did in our last book: the center cannot hold.

We don’t have Toru drinking any Kool-Aid. And the rock Sisyphus is pushing hasn’t come down the hill yet, but it has already started to roll. Toru forgets the spaghetti, but then he rescues the spaghetti. He then has to iron to recover from having to rescue the spaghetti.

We don’t know it yet, and while we do know most women would probably enjoy their partners ironing of free will, we may discover that most women also wouldn’t mind what we’ll call for now a “10-minute phone call.” Not eight or nine minutes, because that would be too short, or 11 or 12 minutes, because that would be tiring. 10 minutes definitely hits the sweet spot. But let’s push that aside for now.

Toru is in his comfort zone. To him, that’s all that matters. It’s been slightly pushed aside by the phone call, but he’s had his spaghetti and now he’s settling in to iron. And when Toru settles in to iron, he really settles in to iron.

And then his wife calls.

Part 2: Open Mic Poetry Hour

His wife calls. She asks how he is. He says he’s ironing. She immediately knows something is wrong. Now, it’s not because of the way that he irons, though frankly, that’s kind of a little odd. Toru has to iron all of his pieces in a strict, 12-step precision way, saying it aloud, otherwise it is ruined entirely. No, just the fact that he’s ironing is enough to tell his wife he’s not well. This is a relationship. Long-term observation, you know, figuring things out with the person that you adore or are ready to kill depending on the particular night. It’s why Adam asked Eve about the apple—or blamed her, depending on how you look at it. So Toru’s wife asks about the ironing, and then it gets even worse.

She asks if he can write poetry.

There are two stages to being a writer. The first is dreading the question, “What do you do?” and relaying that you are a writer. Because they’ll always ask, “Have you been published?” as the next question. Then, as you get more comfortable declaring that you’re a writer, apparently an aura begins to come off of you, because the next thing you’ll hear is, “I write too. Poetry.” Never a novel. Never a screenplay. Always poetry. And sure, you can feel sorry for the actual poets, but let’s face it: they have to have built up some kind of wall for it at this point. Imagine Fitzgerald working on Gatsby and someone asking him, “What do you do?”

“Writing the Great American Novel.”

“Oh, that’s cool. I write poetry.”

Toru’s wife tells him that they can just live on her salary for a while. Toru says that he’ll think about staying home—which, since the novel has about another 600 pages to go, is about the most Toru answer expected. If the next 500 pages or so were just that, giving him an extra 100 for spaghetti and ironing, we’d never get out alive. Thankfully, she insists he go look for the cat.

It’s Murakami, so there’s always a cat, but it’s never just a cat. Kind of like an alley in a horror film is never just an alley, but we’re not there yet. So we can kind of figure Toru is not just a guy looking for a missing pet, since this is Murakami. And thank God the universe is starting to shake, or we’d have 50 pages of Toru’s spaghetti and 50 more of his ironing.

But before Toru can head out for the alley, the phone rings again.

Part 3: D.H. Lawrence on the Phone

The mysterious woman on the phone is back, insisting that she knows him. Toru demands that she prove it, which is the only thing that we recognize so far in the novel. But he passes up the opportunity to pick an interesting topic. Instead of going for something far more interesting—again, this is Toru—like having someone explain what that breakup text meant when they dumped you and said, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” he just asks her to guess how old he is. Because yeah, that’s just statistically unlikely she could nail it based on his voice.

She says she knows him, and he knows that she knows him. She wants him to imagine her outfit. Of course, most men would leap at the chance. Some would go tasteful with some kind of business attire. Some would go stylishly retro with a Playboy bunny outfit. Others—say, the fast, wickedly funny, smart, brunette readers, taking the personal demographic of the blogger into account—might say, “I don’t know, but I’m really hoping maybe Grinch pajamas.” Toru, of course, says he has no idea. And then she tells him she just stepped out of the shower.

Toru realizes, horrified, that it’s phone sex. As does every single reader of Murakami who has ever picked up one of his books. Murakami phone sex: for people who thought regular Murakami sex wasn’t bad enough. The kind that wins the award no one wants for reasons no one understands why they even have it. The kind that makes you wonder if the author has ever met another human being in a dimly lit motel room. And you have to stop thinking about it because he’s been a happily married man his whole life, and you can’t help but wonder if his wife is a reader.

Thankfully, Toru ditches the call because of the cat.

Part 4: Do Alleys Make Sequels?

The alley behind the house is mossy, spider-filled, and leads nowhere. Perfect for a Murakami novel, or for anyone looking for a portal to a place that will finally explain the five Phantasm movies (or is it six?), one of which is 20 minutes’ worth of film spliced entirely together from a previous entry—a not uncommon thing in horror films.

Surprisingly, Toru steps into it anyway. The air is thick and quiet and strange, and the silence is just too off. And at this point, if there are any non-Murakami readers left—and maybe some Murakami readers as well—they’re hoping for a hell dimension that will throw Toru into it, just to hear him say, “I’ve got experience with this, and it is not hot enough for spaghetti.” But if it was a door that opened to another dimension, Toru likely would apologize for the inconvenience.

At this point, we discover that it’s just possible that Toru is our lead character from The Hero with a Thousand Faces—if Joseph Campbell had been born really weird. And May, a teenage girl with a squeaky voice and unsettling, far-too-wise wisdom, is our Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. Which are based on books, but probably most people don’t even know that. It is our first sign that the ordinary rules have begun to shrink. She’s our threshold guardian, a Gandalf in the alley—if Gandalf were a teenage girl with a limp and the talent of a psychological surgeon, cutting right to the core.

Toru hasn’t reached the well yet, but he’s already falling.

You remember we talked about a well, don’t you?

Part 5: Your English Teacher

The bird calls overhead—you know, the one from the title, if it helps—a strange mechanical sound like a toy winding down. Toru hears it and finally feels something start to shift inside. The bird is a metaphor, of course, and Murakami doesn’t hide his metaphors. The title again, right? He leaves them out in the open like a warning label. But it’s still kind of cool. You don’t have to go to college to understand what he’s telling you. The bird winds down, time winds down, Toru’s routines wind down and are not salvageable.

Magical realism isn’t traditional fantasy. It shows a mirror to the world in a different way; it exposes things. It doesn’t whisk you away to another world for no reason. It reveals cracks in the world, or in people, as it reveals the cracks in this one. Toru’s spaghetti, his ironing, his counting—even these are coping mechanisms, not quirks. They’re the scaffolding he uses to keep the darkness at bay, but the world presses in. Remember it’s literature. Remember it’s also life. The center does not hold. The phone calls. The alley. The bird. The girl. The silence. The sense that something is shifting beneath the surface, even if he can’t quite name it.

And then the well. The descent. The place where the inner landscape becomes the only landscape.

Toru climbs down because he has nowhere left to go. The world above has become too strange, too loud, too inconsistent to be a place for him to fit in as he knows it. Down in the well, stripped of spaghetti and ironing and avoidance, he has to confront the dark. He has nothing left—not his religion, not his rituals. The well is not just something that can be seen as a metaphor for depression, but for existential dread itself; it’s all of them at once, distilled into a single, inescapable space of darkness.

The wind-up bird keeps calling. Time keeps winding down. Toru, passive no longer, begins the work.

And this is where the novel stops being funny.

It’s a long, long way down, and when we mocked Toru on the opening page about his spaghetti and his ironing, those jokes fall away. This is where the reader realizes that the humor was a flashlight, not a shield. Like always, it’s a way to navigate the dark, not to avoid it. It’s a way to help us make the descent more bearable.

Toru’s journey is not by itself heroic. It is necessary. He begins the novel as a man who can barely handle a phone call. He ends it as someone who has been stripped of everything he once used to keep himself upright. The routines are gone. The illusions are gone. The scaffolding is gone. All that remains is the inner landscape, raw, unfiltered, and unavoidable.

Not triumph. Not transformation. Just the work of facing what’s inside.

The same work that shadows every page of this blog.

Next week: We’ll discover even if you get your dream, if you couldn’t afford it and it’s handed to you, the first page telling you that you murdered someone is probably a hint. It’s all downhill from there in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

Onward.

Every work of fiction is a window. Some are clean. Some are smeared with the fingerprints of the people who pressed their faces against the glass before us. Some are just damn smudged. This blog exists to look through those windows—not to escape, not to fly, and not to clean up the smudges either. We’ll let somebody else handle that stuff. We’re here to look at the windows and see what we see when we stare through them long enough. And so the first window we open is William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, a novel that drags us into the shadows with a force that feels both inevitable and intimate.

Part One: Heading into the Dark

William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness begins with a train that seems almost ashamed of its own momentum. It drags itself into Tidewater like a creature burdened by what it carries. This is not the cheerful Magic Kingdom train that glides you into an illusion of perfection. Mickey Mouse won’t be hopping off this train when it hits its destination. This train is slow, heavy, reluctant—if it could gasp under the weight of its cargo, it would. It knows the darkness it carries in its belly. And as readers, we settle into that same darkness, preparing for the shadows we’re about to inhabit.

When the train finally arrives—more out of resignation than purpose—it delivers a casket to a family already inhabiting its own graveyard. Milton is damaged in his way. Helen is damaged in hers. And Peyton? Peyton has always been a ghost in this family, and now she is literally one, floating silently through the novel until her voice finally erupts in screams at the end.

Three figures are standing in the center of all of this accumulated wreckage: Milton, the desolate father, with a deeply inappropriate grief, a Southern inversion of Twin Peaks father Leland Palmer; Helen, the icy mother who would go out of her way to scold someone for coughing at a funeral; and Peyton, the daughter in the box. When the train brings her home, we realize a grim truth: Peyton is dead, and yet she is the luckiest one in this broken family.

Her absence exerts a gravitational pull. She haunts Milton and Helen’s bare, spare existence, and it feels inevitable that she will drag them both under. We understand her only through their reactions. She is the thrust of the narrative, the ghost steering the living. By the novel’s end, she claims the ultimate grasp of power by her own devastating choice.

Styron’s Southern Gothic mastery—often compared to Faulkner—shines most vividly in Peyton, who haunts her parents down the halls, through the house, and their entire existence, as every ghost should. She haunts the train as well, the novel, and the reader. By her absence, and by the destruction she provokes, she becomes a more frightening spirit than anything found in a haunted house story.

Milton isn’t just a sad man. He is a deeply weak one, driven by impulses that rot and corrupt his family from within. He wears a smiling, everything-is-fine façade, but inside he is completely hollowed out. His tragic love for Peyton isn’t protective; it’s suffocating. He clings to her as a life raft to avoid facing the wreckage he created. He becomes so abrasive you want to channel Cher in Moonstruck, slap him across the face, and shout, “Snap out of it!”

Helen, trapped in a marriage she despises, feeds off of its misery. Powerless in her relationship, she weaponizes morality and suffering, wielding them like a lance. She comes at Milton with the force of a Category 5 hurricane.

Peyton becomes the collateral damage. Because Milton adores her in his unnatural way, Helen must tear her down. And anyone who has lived through hurricane season knows: it’s not always the pull of the storm that destroys you. Sometimes it’s the tornadoes that are spawned off the forceful, unpredictable edge.

Peyton’s interior monologue arrives late, but it becomes the emotional core. Early on, she is defined by the dysfunction orbiting her absence. But Peyton isn’t just talking to herself at the novel’s end. She was actually the center of the novel while alive. And in this family, the center could not hold. It was not the eye of a hurricane. It collapsed and destroyed her.

Part Two: Cathedrals, Windows, and the Things You Can See

The novel opens with the train dragging Peyton home and ends with Peyton at a window with birds and a little chatter. But the most revealing window is the Country Club.

The Country Club is a house where every piece of furniture is arranged perfectly. It’s the kind of place where you’re asked to remove your shoes so you don’t muck up the carpet. It’s about appearances and appearances only—how things seem, not how they are. This obsession grips Tidewater like a vise. The club is the town’s social cathedral, and it becomes the altar that destroys Milton, Helen, and by extension, Peyton.

This is where Milton drowns himself in alcohol, desperate for approval he will never receive. He knows the elite mock him behind his back, reducing his tragedy to a high school cafeteria dynamic. He knows his destruction lies simply in the fact that he doesn’t know which fork to use.

Helen thrives here. The club is a nest of vipers, and she is most powerful among fellow snakes. Her coldness is an asset. When she slices into Milton, it’s admired. Her bitterness toward Peyton grows, encouraged by families who relish the spectacle like watching a Roman gladiator fight.

For Peyton, the club is suffocating. She is beautiful, tragic, and constantly discussed, but never allowed to be just herself. She is admired, dissected, objectified, and trapped by expectations she can’t meet. It’s not surprising she ends up in a morgue. The Country Club seemed to be doing autopsies on her the entire time anyway. But Peyton refuses the lie—and collapses entirely as a result.

This window into the Country Club shows us the world that shaped Peyton and the world that destroys her. It leads her to the final window—the one she opens in search of an escape. She sees birds, sees freedom, sees possibility. But every window she sees and looks through isn’t merely just smudged or merely just dirty; it is cracked, and it is broken.

Part Three: When You Open the Window

Peyton spent her life searching. She wanted parents who wouldn’t suffocate or destroy her. She just basically wanted parents who were kind of normal. She wanted a place where she could simply be Peyton. But her vision was limited. She could only look through cracked, dusty windows, and yearn for what she couldn’t reach or see.

Styron ends the book by holding Peyton’s skull to a window, forcing her—and us—to confront what she cannot have. The ultimate tease. Peyton couldn’t leave her window. If you were teased that much, who could? She couldn’t survive the corruption of her parents or the collapse of her life. So she did the only thing she could. She opened the window. And she joined the birds.

But Peyton couldn’t fly.

Lie Down in Darkness begins in darkness and ends in darkness. Even people that are not fans of Styron should at least be able to say he got the title right. This blog begins by looking through that same fiction window. We enter the shadows with Peyton, but unlike her, we remain on this side of the glass. We can see it’s a little dusty and smudged, and a little cracked in places. We can see the darkness, though, without being consumed by it. We don’t need to jump. We know we cannot fly.

But as long as we keep looking—at the darkness, at the world outside, at the things fiction reveals, at the shadows, and not circle away in fear—we don’t need wings. We don’t even need a perfect, unscratched window.

We just need to understand.

Next Week’s Window: Peyton opened a window to fly. Next week, we open one to climb down into the dark. Join us at the bottom of the well in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Onward.