Scott Landon is Lisey’s deceased husband. He was a famous author, having won the Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Although he is dead before the novel begins, his presence dominates the narrative through Lisey’s memories, his writing, and the bool that he leaves behind for Lisey to follow.

As a celebrated author, Scott is publicly defined by his literary success, but privately, he is shaped by trauma, mental illness, and cyclical violence through generations of his family. At the start of the novel, Scott exists largely as an idealized husband and brilliant writer whose darker history Lisey has consciously avoided examining, a fact which emphasizes the theme of The Tensions Between Private Suffering and Artistic Creation. As she reflects on the hundreds of photos of him and his various speaking engagements, she notes how charismatic and loved he was, while even thinking of him in difficult moments for guidance on how she should act. At the same time, her initial flashes of memory hint toward his trauma and largely inaccessible inner life.

Scott’s defining characteristic is his attempt to control chaos and trauma through storytelling. From childhood onward, he uses narratives like bools, riddles, invented language, and, eventually, novels, to impose order on experiences that would otherwise be unbearable. The bools he shares with Lisey from his childhood are playful, as is the one he constructs for her, but they originate as his earliest form of coping. They are developed alongside his brother, Paul, to survive their father’s physical and emotional abuse, as well as Paul’s mental health episodes. This fact explains both his inner drive as an author and his emotional secrecy: By transforming trauma into storytelling, he protects himself while preventing others from fully knowing him.

Scott’s relationship with violence is troubling and conflicted. He inherits what he calls the “bad-gunky,” a compulsion toward self-harm that runs in his family, and he believes from an early age that pain can function as release. His blood-bools and acts of self-injury are desperate attempts to manage the psychological pressure of his family’s trauma, its legacy of violence, and his own trauma. He fears and represses these things, working constantly to contain it. His refusal to have children stems from this fear, emphasizing his moral awareness and resisting the idea that mental health is inherently dangerous or unstable, as is problematically shown through the deaths of his brother and father.

Jim Dooley, who initially invents the name “Zack McCool” when he contacts Lisey, is the novel’s primary antagonist and an embodiment of psychological horror and physical danger. Unlike Scott, whose violence and danger are rooted in inherited trauma, Dooley represents predatory obsession and a lack of empathy. At the start of the novel, he exists as a threatening voice that leaves messages and letters for Lisey, warning her to turn over Scott’s remaining writings. This initial distance heightens his menace, as the novel emphasizes unseen threats and psychological pressure over immediate physical violence.

Dooley’s obsession with Scott’s unpublished work is motivated by a desire for power and proximity. This fact is most clear in what Lisey discovers almost immediately after he contacts her: Even if she turns over the materials to Woodbody as he demands, Woodbody has no way of contacting him, thereby making his violence unstoppable. He wants possession of Scott’s material simply because he has fixated on Scott’s novels throughout his life, underscoring The Tensions Between Private Suffering and Artistic Creation. Scott’s trauma and creativity are consumed by people like Dooley without regard for the emotional cost or his personal life. Dooley’s willingness to terrorize Lisey to obtain the manuscripts emphasizes his fundamental inability to recognize her as a person, instead seeing her as an obstacle guarding something that he believes he has a right to.

Psychologically, Dooley is characterized by volatility and entitlement. Both Woodbody and Lisey note his constantly shifting personas, as he characterizes himself as a violent criminal, Southern drifter, and educated literary enthusiast. This instability in self-presentation makes him unpredictable, which in turn makes him frightening. Dooley introduces a real-world danger that validates Lisey’s fears, merging psychological threat and physical harm in a way that embodies Lisey’s internal struggle with the violence of the past.

In this way, Dooley serves as a catalyst for Lisey’s change. His escalating threats force her out of her grief and inaction, compelling her to engage with Scott’s bool and confront her suppressed memories. While the supernatural elements of the novel suggest cosmic or inherited evil that is incapable of being defeated, Dooley anchors the story in a physical, recognizable human antagonist. In threatening and then invading Lisey’s life, he forces the resilience and moral clarity on Lisey that she must develop to survive.