Not Quite Dead Yet
57 pages • 1-hour read
Holly JacksonNot Quite Dead Yet
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Parts 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, graphic violence, cursing, illness, and death.
Part 1: “Friday October 31” - Part 2: “Sunday November 2”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Margaret “Jet” Mason is at the annual Halloween Fair in her hometown of Woodstock, Vermont. Her father, Scott, is the owner of Mason Construction and one of the wealthiest people in the town. Each year, he funds the Halloween Fair.
In the house of mirrors, Jet is approached by her ex-boyfriend, JJ Lim. He tries to talk to her about their breakup, but she dismisses him. She is saved by her brother, Luke, and his wife, Sophia, who scare JJ off.
Jet has a troubled relationship with her brother, and Sophia used to be one of her best friends. When Luke brings up taking over Mason Construction, Jet starts an argument with him, then angrily leaves.
Outside, Jet runs into police chief Lou Jankowski and officer Jack Finney. Jack is her parents’ neighbor and her friend Billy’s father. Jack tells her that Billy was looking for her.
Jet continues to walk around the fair, annoyed at the number of people she runs into. She is 27 years old, and she recently moved home to live with her parents after dropping out of law school in Boston. She is bothered by how stagnant her life seems but reminds herself that she has “all the time in the world” to fix things (7).
A drunk man dressed as a clown confronts Jet. She recognizes him as Andrew Smith. He complains about her family and how they “destroy” everything. Billy and Jack stop him, and Jack offers to give Andrew a ride home but threatens to make him spend a night in jail.
Done with the fair, Jet decides to walk home, where she is greeted by her dog, Reggie. She takes a cookie, baked by Sophia, from the kitchen and sits on the couch to scroll through her phone.
Reggie becomes anxious and starts to whine. She assumes he wants her cookie, but then he begins to growl angrily. She hears footsteps behind her, then is hit over the head. Everything goes dark.
Later, Billy finds Jet unconscious. He calls 911 at 11:09 pm. He begs them to send the police and an ambulance, upset by her unresponsiveness and the excessive amount of blood.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
Jet wakes up in the hospital. Things are blurry, and the back of her head hurts, but she remembers being attacked. Her parents and her brother are by her bedside, excited that she is awake but hesitant for some reason.
Luke leaves the room and comes back with Jet’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Lee. She explains that Jet was hit three times on the back of her head. This caused blood to pool on her brain, which then sent her into cardiac arrest. They were able to stabilize her and get rid of the blood. However, one of the hits broke her clivus, a small bone at the base of her skull.
Dr. Lee pulls up a scan of Jet’s brain and shows her the bone fragment that broke off the clivus. The fragment is too close to her major artery to her brain, making removal nearly impossible. However, if they don’t remove it, it will cause an aneurysm. Jet asks when that would happen, and Dr. Lee estimates that she has seven days at most. The aneurysm will be fatal.
Jet also has polycystic kidney disease (PKD), which she inherited from her father. It causes cysts to form in her kidneys, which lead to pain, bleeding, and high blood pressure. Additionally, it means that Jet has weak arterial walls, specifically in her heart and brain.
Given all this information, Dr. Lee explains that Jet has a “[l]ess than ten percent chance of survival” if they try to surgically remove the bone fragment (26). She does not want to do the surgery unless Jet understands the risks completely. Jet must decide between waiting for an inevitable brain aneurysm within the next seven days and undergoing a surgery that will very likely result in her death.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Jet contemplates what to do. Her mother, Dianne, pressures her into choosing the surgery, but Dr. Lee repeatedly insists that it is Jet’s choice to make.
Jet is relieved when the police show up to question her about the attack. Jack comes into her room with Chief Jankowski and George Ecker of the Vermont State Police. They ask her several questions about the attack, but Jet repeatedly insists that she doesn’t remember much. All she knows is that it was one attacker, and they hit her from behind. She is shocked to realize that the police have no weapon and very little information.
Detective Ecker asks Jet about JJ, who has not been heard from since Halloween, not even by his own family. Despite this, Jet insists that he would not have attacked her.
After the police leave, her family and Dr. Lee return. Jet tells them that she has decided not to have the surgery. She would rather have seven more days instead of dying right now. Jet’s mother is upset and begs Jet to change her mind, but she insists that she is certain. She jokes with her mother that her catch phrase is she will “do it later” (36), but now she will finally accomplish something: She will solve her own murder.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
Jet rides with Luke back to the house, unable to face her parents, who are angry with her decision. The police follow.
Jet asks Jack to show her the crime scene, hoping that she can get more information from him because he knows her. The police officers hesitate, but she is adamant that she wants to see it.
Looking at her living room, Jet thinks of how it will never be the same. She remembers watching television as a child with Luke and their sister, Emily. She wonders if her parents will move after she dies.
Jet convinces Jack to explain what happened. He shows her numbered markers on blood splatters throughout the living room. She was hit three times, twice while she was sitting and once while she was on the ground. The only information that they have is that the attacker was taller than her and likely right-handed, based on the blood.
After Jet was hit, the neighbors heard Reggie “screaming.” Billy entered the house and found Jet. Based on this, they know that Jet was attacked sometime around 11:00 pm.
Jack tells her the assailant knew about their front door camera, so he came in and left through the back door. Another officer takes photographs of the footprints in the backyard. Finney is hopeful that forensic evidence will give them hair, fiber, or a footprint from the assailant.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
While waiting outside, watching the police work, Jet talks to her parents. She struggles to come up with words, a side effect that Dr. Lee told her would be likely to happen. Her mother again asks Jet to do the surgery, but Jet insists that she has made up her mind.
Detective Ecker starts to leave, but Jet stops him. She asks to see her Apple watch before he sends it for analysis.
Looking through her watch, Jet sees that her heartbeat stopped at 10:46 pm. She also has two text messages, one from her mother and one from JJ. All JJ wrote was “Sorry” at 10:58 pm. Ecker questions it, but Jet points out how strange it would be for JJ to text if he had her phone.
Jet then looks at the location information for her phone. It was last turned on at 10:56 pm, just a few minutes away on River Street.
Billy comes to the house with Reggie. She realizes that she would likely be dead if not for Billy and her dog. She tells Billy that he is the only person she can trust, as she has known him all her life, and he is the one who found her. When Jet discovers that no one has told Billy that she is going to die, she breaks the news to him. He breaks down.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
Jet rewatches the doorbell camera from the night of her attack several times. She sees herself coming home, and later, Billy arriving and breaking down the door. She rewinds to earlier in the day.
At 3:24 pm, Sophia arrived, carrying her baby. Jet assumes that she was dropping off the cookies, but she doesn’t see them. Instead, she goes inside for a few minutes and then leaves. Jet rewinds to an hour earlier and sees Sophia’s car again. This time, she has the cookies. Jet makes a note, wondering why Sophia would be there twice.
Finally, Jet makes herself stop rewatching the footage. As she lies in bed trying to sleep that night, she thinks about what little time she has left.
Parts 1-2 Analysis
From the start, Jet is characterized as someone who exists in a liminal space. She graduated from college but dropped out of law school, leaving her with a current lack of direction in life. She treats her family and the people in Woodstock largely with annoyance and resentment, repeatedly insisting to herself that she will eventually move away and have a successful career. She tells herself that “life [will] really begin” for her soon, introducing the theme of The Value of Living in the Present through her initial status quo of always looking to the future rather than being in the present (15). Central to Jet’s character in Part 1 is the repetition of the phrase “I’ve got all the time in the world” and its different variations (7), connecting to the motif of time. She is adamant that she wants to be successful yet puts little effort into doing so each day. She has the vague idea of a dog walking app that she thinks would be useful yet has done no work beyond the general concept. Each time she thinks about where her life will go from here, she reminds herself that she “has time,” emphasizing her current unhappiness and transitional state. As Jet acts annoyed by those around her, dreaming of some future elsewhere when she is finally happy, she also struggles to see the value of her day-to-day life in Woodstock. Ironically, the attack on her life steals away the very thing she thought she would always have: time. Ultimately, the attack forces Jet’s hand in her life, eliminating the possibility of change and forcing her to reckon with the life she has already lived.
The novel utilizes the elements of the thriller and mystery genres to establish its premise and begin the action. Although the basic premise of the novel—a diagnosis that offers a concrete timeline of seven days until Jet’s death—is unrealistic, it establishes a “ticking clock,” a common convention of the thriller genre that builds suspense and tension. It is medically possible that someone could have a fragment of bone threatening their life, but Dr. Lee’s diagnosis that she has seven days before an aneurysm forms and ruptures is far too concrete. Additionally, it is unlikely that Jet would be released from the hospital and functioning as she is (and will throughout the text) with a life-threatening blood clot already forming. However, the diagnosis serves the purpose of disrupting Jet’s status quo and narrowing her focus; her investigation begins immediately, and she quickly acquires a partner in Billy to form a detective duo, a mystery genre trope.
Additionally, Jackson presents several possible suspects throughout the first part of the text, creating suspicion around various characters. At the fair, Jet has tense altercations with both JJ and Andrew. Coupled with JJ’s disappearance and Andrew’s anger towards her family, these two characters become the prime suspects. At the same time, Jet begins to question Sophia’s actions at her house, while even questioning Billy about his whereabouts despite saying that he is “the only person [she] can trust not to be the killer” (56). These possible suspects, all closely connected to Jet and her family, build a feeling of paranoia that is exacerbated by Jet’s actions as she obsesses over the crime scene, the Ring video footage, and questions even her own family.
One of the overarching conflicts throughout the novel is between Jet’s family, specifically their company, Mason Construction, and the town of Woodstock. Andrew introduces the conflict when he confronts Jet at the fair, telling her, “[Y]our fucking family. Think throwing this fucking party every year makes up for any of it? […] All of you. Destroy everything you touch!” (11). Although Andrew is abrasive and threatening toward Jet, who has little to do with her family’s construction business, Jet’s response to it—that he is just “[d]runk and sad again” (12)—emphasizes her disconnection from the realities of Woodstock. In this way, the setting plays a key role in the theme of The Connection Between Privilege and Corruption. Although the specifics of Mason Construction’s perceived crimes against the community are not yet revealed, the narrative establishes the seriousness of the conflict. Jet and her family hold little empathy for these people, and their lack of compassion emphasizes their privilege. Ultimately, this conflict raises the possibility of a much wider pool of suspects in Jet’s attack, introducing the idea that she may have been attacked for something outside of her control.
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