Content Warning: This section of the Study Guide discusses police brutality, torture, and violence, including the murders of children.

“She looks once more onto the street returned to an evening’s quiet, the heat from the hall as she steps inside and shut the front door and then she stands a moment examining the card and finds she has been holding her breath. This feeling now that something has come into the house, she wants to put the baby down, she wants to stand and think, seeing how it stood with the two men and came into the hallway of its own accord, something formless yet felt.”

This quote highlights the sense of foreboding Lynch develops throughout the novel. Eilish knows there is something wrong even though she doesn’t yet know what it is. A symbolic but also literal threat has been presented to her in the form of the detectives at her door. The “it” referred to in this quote is a symbolic fear or premonition of fear and insecurity.

“He steps about the room looking though not seeing, the newspaper might be already forgotten, he is seeking something within the shade of his own thinking and cannot alight upon it. He turns then and studies his wife as she feeds the child on her breast and the sight of this comforts him, a sense of life contracted to an image so at odds with malice his mind begins to cool.”

Larry’s “seeking something within the shade of his own thinking” is a depiction of Larry struggling with the premonition and foreboding that something bad is going to happen. He “cannot alight upon it” because the threat to his life and safety is incomprehensible, given the society he has lived in his entire life. This uncertainty and inability to grapple with the shifts in society emphasizes the tension of the novel and reveals how dystopian societies form around individual uncertainty and confusion. This instability is juxtaposed with the natural and domestic image of a mother breastfeeding her child, an image that highlights how radically the Stacks’ world is about to change.

“[T]he real work of a microbiologist is standing at the bench for long hours seeking evidence, testing hypothesis against reality, against whatever an individual might seek to believe, the answer true or false is found in the result.”

The construction of the dystopian society in this novel is based on perceptions of fact versus fiction. As a scientist, Eilish sees