47 pages • 1-hour read
Brother
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Chapters 25-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of bullying, sexual violence, child abuse, child death, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, death, suicidal ideation, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.
Chapter 25 Summary
After reading Alice’s comic, Michael returns from the woods and sees Wade fixing his truck. He offers to go with him to the junkyard, but Wade tells him to go inside. He follows a glow into the dining room, where there’s a birthday cake with sparklers.
Reb announces, “Surprise.” Michael sees Lucy duct taped and tied to a chair. Wade brings in Alice, who’s duct-taped too. Reb wants Michael to kill Lucy to confirm his loyalty to the family. In exchange, they’ll keep Alice alive in the basement. After willing himself not to kill Lucy, Michael stabs Lucy in the stomach to prevent Reb from stabbing Alice.
Reb gives Michael his “real” birthday present: the keys to the Delta and a piece of paper with a picture of the little house with green shutters.
Chapter 26 Summary
Michael realizes he’s under the influence of Reb’s “master plan.” As he drives to the house, he cries for all the girls he killed. At the house, he hears a voice that sounds like a law enforcement officer but is only a TV commercial.
The house has many photographs. There’s a photo of a mother and father and their son and daughter. There’s another photo of the family in the green-shuttered home. Michael then notices that the boy has disappeared. There are photos of the parents with the little girl, then the photos only include the little girl. The little girl looks familiar. Michael solves Reb’s “puzzle.” Michael was the little boy, Alice was his sister, and the mother and father were his parents. After vomiting, Michael takes an axe from the yard and returns to the Morrow farmhouse.
Chapter 27 Summary
At the house, Michael finds that his bedroom, Reb’s bedroom, and Misty’s bedroom are empty. His parents are sleeping in their bedroom downstairs. Michael wishes he could be cinematic like Reb, but he resigns himself to silence.
Since Wade is the “lesser evil,” Michael first kills his father with the axe. Momma hits Michael with a lamp. She claims she didn’t intend to hurt people. Michael kills her with the axe.
Michael imagines the worst for Alice. Once he sees her in the cellar, he’s relieved that she only has a “gash” above her right knee. He tries to cut her loose. Alice resists, believing Michael will kill her like Lucy. Michael ends up accidentally cutting Alice.
Reb announces his presence with a flippant “howdy.” Reb presents his complex plan as vengeance for Lauralynn. For the first time, he explicitly states that Momma and Wade killed Lauralynn. He makes several jokes about the bleak future of Alice and Michael’s relationship. He alludes to the family’s cannibalism and reminds Michael that he killed his first family and the Morrows. Reb pushes Michael to kill Alice. Michael thinks Reb’s plan only makes sense if Reb wants Michael to kill him too. Reb says he expects Michael to die by suicide after Alice’s presumed death.
Impatient, Reb stabs Alice’s stomach and pushes her toward Michael. Michael attacks Reb, and they violently struggle until Reb slips on Alice’s blood and Michael kills him with the knife Reb dropped. Alice runs, and Michael chases her. To demonstrate his allyship, he drops the knife. He catches her and apologizes. Alice is upset that Michael killed her best friend and her mother. She picks up the knife and kills Michael. As he dies, Michael imagines the dreamily normal life he would’ve had if he had stayed with his first family. He hopes Alice manages to make it to the Delta and survive. Unfortunately, the car keys are in his pocket.
Chapters 25-27 Analysis
In the closing chapters, Ahlborn uses Michael’s birthday party as a climactic event that brings all of the elements of the plot together. The Morrows, Alice, and Lucy are all together, so as Reb foreshadowed, the party makes Alice and Lucy a part of the family by subjecting them to its egregious practices. The party prompts Reb to give Michael a gift, which leads to the house with green shutters and the truth. Through specific imagery, Ahlborn creates a history of Michael’s first family, vividly describing the pictures and offering hints about the solution to Reb’s puzzle before Michael fully understands. Imagery also makes the violent finale discernable—although the action is quick and could be hard to follow, Ahlborn makes the location of the knife, which will be the murder weapon, clear and prominent. Reb drops the knife, allowing Michael to pick it up and kill him. Michael then drops the knife, making it possible for Alice to kill Michael. The birthday party has a ghastly irony. Instead of a celebration of Michael’s life, it’s a massacre that ends in his death. Unlike the fairytales Michael mentions in previous chapters, the book lacks a clear, happy ending.
At the birthday party, Reb, with his “master plan” complete, stops his elaborate manipulations of Michael, bringing the theme of The Difference Between Loyalty and Complicity to a close. Reb tells Alice, “Not sure you guys will wanna hang out after this, though. He helped me drag your momma out of the house a few nights ago […]. And then we had her for dinner. Probably still have leftovers, if you’re hungry” (478). The crass recitation of events leaves out the manipulations to which he subjected Michael, implying that he was a complicit accessory to the crimes rather than acting out of loyalty. With this revelation, the full impact of his actions is brought home to Michael; in addition, the information foreshadows Alice’s changing perspective on Michael and her decision not to trust him.
The narrative’s centering of powerful woman characters continues with Alice and Momma’s deaths. Though Michael kills Momma, his act is less courageous than Lauralynn’s and Misty’s respective confrontations. Michael’s sisters didn’t have a weapon, nor did they catch Momma in a vulnerable position. They were in danger, yet they had the will to stand up to Momma. Michael’s inability to say something to Momma furthers his lack of empowerment. Alice, on the other hand, takes control of her situation rather than waiting to be rescued. By killing Michael, Alice denies him the chance to be her “prince.” She subverts the fairytale structure by dispatching her male romantic partner. At the same time, Ahlborn subverts the story’s gritty feminism by keeping the key to the car in Michael’s pocket. The man holds the literal key to Alice’s presumed survival.
As no Morrow family members live, the end of the novel offers a stark takeaway about how to break The Cyclical Nature of Trauma. It implies that the only way to stop the Morrows is to end the family line. They can’t survive and prosper; rather, they become defunct. Confusing loyalty and complicity extends the existence of the Morrows but the differences between the two terms inevitably appear, which also leads to the Morrows’ downfall. As the Morrows extend their trauma further than ever before with Lucy and Alice’s abductions, they collapse their own family. Constantly injured and terrorized, the members lack the wellness to keep themselves and their family alive.
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