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.
