Month: March 2026

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.