Blackthorn builds a world in which personal memory and public record shift under pressure from trauma, magic, and deliberate erasure. Maven Blackthorn’s faltering sense of reality, the disappearance of physical evidence, and the later confession about altered histories show that truth in the novel moves instead of standing firm. What characters see, remember, or document slips away, giving the book a Gothic mood in which reality grows increasingly unstable. While this narrative technique creates a sense of ambiguity, it also reflects the unreliability of people and records in systems dominated by specific groups, like the Croft family, or malicious interference, like Esme and Davina’s spells.

Maven’s changing perceptions set the tone. Her headaches, nosebleeds, and lapses in memory blur the line between ordinary forgetfulness, hallucination, and outside influence. She recalls her aunts describing a nightmare about snakes, but they later deny the exchange, leaving her unsure of her own mind (220). Though the Epilogue blames carbon monoxide poisoning for these lapses, Maven’s lived experience reflects the challenges of living in an uncertain world. Her experiences grow stranger as she imagines oily black flies crawling over her and catches sight of monstrous shapes in the church. These moments turn Maven into an unreliable witness, and her confusion shapes the world around her, turning her logical view of reality upside down. By creating an immersive description of Maven’s experience, Geissinger exposes the terror of losing faith in one’s memories.

Physical facts in Solstice prove just as unstable. Most notably, Lorinda Blackthorn’s corpse vanishes from a locked room in a funeral home, and Maven eventually learns that eight Blackthorn graves in the local cemetery stand empty. When the Anderson family, who ran the funeral home, disappears as well, the pattern points toward an ominous source of interference that scrubs away inconvenient evidence, and only the climax of the novel reveals the involvement of Maven’s malicious aunts. Even outside of Solstice, Esme and Davina’s spell erases Luce’s memory and removes any record of Maven or Ezra. In a world where bodies, records, and even people can disappear, nothing physical can be a guarantee of stability.

When Davina admits that Blackthorn witches use “memory erasure spells that make people forget someone ever existed” (340), she explains that physical reality bends to the will of powerful people. Her actions show that history, both personal and collective, can be rewritten by those with power, and anyone searching for truth—like Maven and Ronan—must work against broader forces that alter the past itself. By working against one another, both the Blackthorn and Croft families have the ability to change reality, and Maven soon finds the collective effect to be disorienting in the extreme.