58 pages • 1-hour read
Slade House
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal death and death.
Moth
The moth is an image that recurs in several of the chapters, allowing it to function as a motif for The Corruptive Power of Wealth. It first appears at the end of Chapter 1, when Nathan finds himself trapped in the lacuna. The moth is drawn to the Grayers’ ritual candle, which will inevitably kill it if it gets too close to the flame. Once the ritual is engaged, time freezes in the lacuna, causing the moth to remain stuck just an inch away from the flame that attracts it. When Gordon Edmonds dies at the end of Chapter 2, he sees the moth again, this time burnt to a crisp on the floorboards.
The moth’s appearance and its traditional association with being lured toward death symbolize the allure that Slade House has for all the Grayers’ guests. Each one is drawn by the promise of some resolution in their lives, only for them to get too close and become trapped and destroyed in the process. The freezing of the moth is especially apt for the souls of the guests whose residual energies manifest in Slade House years later. In addition, during her final confrontation with Marinus, Norah compares Marinus to a moth to give herself confidence for their imminent battle. She uses the moth’s symbolic frailty and sacrifice to convince herself that she can outlast her final guest.
The Grandfather Clock
The grandfather clock on the first landing of Slade House’s stairway, which leads to the lacuna, functions as a symbol for the Grayer twins’ ethos on immortality. The clock first appears in Chapter 1, when Nathan Bishop passes it by on the way to find his mother. The clock is distinct because it has no hands on its face. Instead, the face is engraved with three phrases: “TIME IS…TIME WAS…TIME IS NOT” (26). This points to the shift in time’s power over the Grayer twins as they feed on Engifted souls to avoid the inevitable passage of time and death.
Before the construction of the lacuna, time is the master of Norah and Jonah’s lives, like all humans, bringing them closer to death. By freezing their bodies in the lacuna, they overcome death, allowing time’s power to become a fact of their personal past. In their Atemporal lives, time merely “was,” reminding the Grayers of the fact that it used to control the boundaries of their lives. Now, they assert their immortality by stressing the idea that time does not exist for them anymore. This is emphasized by the absence of the clock hands, which mark time and tell them how much further they are from birth and how much closer they are to death. In addition, the grandfather clock’s proximity to the portraits of the Grayers’ past and present victims is a spatial reminder that underscores the method by which the Grayers can adopt this ethos.
Immortality
Immortality acts in the narrative as a motif for the theme of the corruptive power of wealth because it represents an immaterial good that the Grayers strive to possess. In the first chapter, Jonah describes having a nightmare of “[f]ood that makes you hungrier, the more of it you eat” (18). This is a veiled reference to the process of feeding on Engifted souls to extend their lives. The longer the Grayers can extend their lives, the more life they crave. In effect, this reorients their lives around the feeding cycles that sustain the lacuna. When Norah returns to her birth body for the ritual to consume Nathan Bishop’s life, she compares her immortal body to an “alien shell,” instead of her home. Norah’s immortality has caused her to dissociate herself from the body that marked her material identity.
Later, in Chapter 5, Marinus argues that immortality has engendered the loss of the Grayers’ humanity: “What’s a metalife without a mission? It’s mere feeding” (234). This suggests that the Grayers have turned into animals, defined by their instinct for survival. The Grayers have been corrupted by the wealth of their immortality and its unsatisfying nature, which makes them crave more. Their desire for the most valuable thing they could possess made them something other than human.
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