Month: February 2026

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.