54 pages • 1-hour read
Stolen Tongues
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of anti-Indigenous racism, child death, suicidal ideation, and death.
Felix Blackwell
Felix Blackwell is the 28-year-old narrator and protagonist. His dynamism relies on his change from a person who doesn’t believe in the supernatural to one who does, even though he gives up trying to understand the entity that pursues him and his fiancée, Faye, from Colorado to their home in California.
Felix is loyal and very dedicated to Faye. He is routinely sleep-deprived, first because of Faye’s parasomnia and, later, his own. He is frightened beyond words when he observes certain changes in her, especially in this state, as well as changes in himself. He even begins to question the motives and knowledge possessed by many people in Faye’s family, the Spencers. He feels certain that the Impostor wants information that Faye has and unfettered access to her mind and soul, and these thoughts, he says, “anchored me to my sanity. The desire to protect her gave me strength” (161).
Even as the emotional distance between Felix and Faye grows and Felix’s mental health declines, he resists the pull of death by suicide because of his commitment to her. He says, “Devotion and hopelessness battled inside of me, yanking my mind back and forth across the landscape of my thoughts. I felt ready to die to protect her, and yet nothing I did kept her safe for long” (239). Felix routinely chases supernatural beings with the intention of confronting them, begins to sleepwalk himself—something he’s never done prior to meeting Faye—and dreams of the relief he thinks death might provide.
Through it all, however, he seeks solutions, pursues the truth from Faye’s cagey and dishonest parents, and is even willing to return to the horror cabin alone to seek a solution to their monstrous problem. In short, he’s willing to do and try just about anything to extricate Faye from the clutches of the Impostor.
Faye Spencer
Faye is Felix’s 26-year-old fiancée. By day, she works as an animal keeper at a local sanctuary; by night, she talks to spirits and engages in all manner of terrifying parasomnia behaviors.
Faye is complex: deeply emotional but private, highly susceptible to stress, so much so that she develops severe physical symptoms because of it. Felix says that she drinks so much Coke that it is likely the main component of her blood, yet she dislikes greasy foods such as pizza. As he tells Angela, “Faye was a complicated universe of great and terrible wonders, and always tried to hide her real personality from the world” (133). She feels intense guilt and pain resulting from her interactions with the Impostor—especially when they begin to involve Felix and, worse, her infant nephew, Caleb—because she holds herself to very high standards. Felix says that “She pushes herself in everything she does. Such a perfectionist. She doesn’t even realize that she’s already perfect” (134).
Lynn eventually reveals the significance of the number “5,” which throws light on an important event in Faye’s childhood. Felix understands that the pain of losing Christopher was so great that Faye’s childhood mind buried his existence and death deep in her unconscious, so that she could not access his memory even in her dreams. When Tíwé explains to Felix that the Impostor has taken an interest in children before, it clarifies why five-year-old Faye was so interesting to the entity: She was a child herself who was repressing the knowledge of another child’s death.
Faye defeats the Imposter at the novel’s end by deciding to invite and confront him instead of trying to evade him. She tells the Imposter about Christopher, but then orders him to go, which breaks his power over her once and for all. In doing so, Faye shows that she can act bravely and decisively, solving the problem herself instead of needing Felix to protect her.
Greg and Lynn Spencer
Greg and Lynn are Faye’s parents. Although Greg’s night terrors and sleep talking began at the cabin after the death of their stillborn son, Christopher, and Faye began speaking to an unknown presence there, Lynn and Greg choose not to mention any of this to Felix and Faye before they visit the cabin.
Greg is gruff and stoic. He is private and unemotional, so much so that Felix says he has “all the personality of stone” (33). Lynn says that Greg would be embarrassed and “furious” if he found out that she ever told Felix and Faye about his nightmares at the cabin; however, once Greg understands how deeply and seriously affected Faye is by whatever spoke to her at the cabin, he does indicate a new level of trust and appreciation for Felix. He even takes responsibility for failing to warn them against whatever now pursues them and apologizes. Greg had to “forc[e] the last words up with considerable effort” (151), as though apologizing for something is an action he rarely, if ever, takes. Thus, Greg is a dynamic character in that he realizes his culpability and he tries to make it right.
Lynn, on the other hand, strikes Felix as guilty from the start. When he first asks her about her experiences at the cabin, she claims she was “never comfortable up there” (64), and he watches her eyes dart everywhere but his face. After more questions, she becomes very upset and develops a guilty expression. Nonetheless, she continues to lie, insisting that, “We stayed there many times over the years [….]. And I never experienced anything like [what you did]. No voices, no dreams, nothing” (66). Later, Lynn admits that they haven’t stayed at the cabin since the time they went after the stillbirth of their son and that, on that trip, something did talk to Faye from the woods.
Felix claims that Lynn is one of the more duplicitous people he’s ever met: “Faye’s mother […] would go to great lengths of insincerity to avoid telling the truth” (110), especially if that truth is painful to her. Lynn continues to hide things from Felix and Faye, including Christopher’s short existence and the events that followed. It is only because Becca urges Felix to ask her mother about the significance of “5” that he finally learns the truth, demonstrating Lynn’s reluctance to confront what happened.
Tíwé and Nathan Lopez
Tíwé and his son, Nathan, are local Indigenous men who live in the area of Colorado near the cabin. Ranger Pike introduces Tíwé and Nathan Lopez to Felix, as Pike and Tíwé have been friends for a “long time.” That Tíwé and Nathan seem relatively interchangeable in the narrative is one way in which the text treats Indigenous people as different from white characters. In writing Tíwé and Nathan so similarly—unlike Lynn and Faye, another parent/child pair—Blackwell inadvertently gives them less humanity than other characters, making them seem more “mythic” or representative of entire cultural groups. While white characters are written as individuals who represent themselves; Tíwé and Nathan seem to stand in for all Indigenous peoples in a very reductive and highly problematic way.
Tíwé is aware of the stereotypes, and he even jokes about having foreseen his first telephone conversation with Felix in a dream. He laughs and says that “Sometimes it’s fun to play the part. For the tourists, you know” (83). He acknowledges the unfair representations of Indigenous peoples by non-Indigenous cultures, saying, “We’re not all shamans and wise men. In fact, we cuss and dick around and use Facebook” (83). While he may seem unbothered by the stereotypes and caricatures of Indigenous peoples, his numerous jokes about them suggest that he might be more perturbed than he lets on.
Felix describes Tíwé’s “weathered face” and his deep voice, which is “rich and textured, the kind you’d hear narrating a nature documentary” (163, 83, emphasis added), both stereotypical depictions of Indigenous individuals. Nathan says that the visiting scholars from universities often make their community feel like “lab rats,” while Tíwé says they make him think “of Jane Goodall, living among the chimps” (164). Again, he laughs, but the analogies suggest that Tíwé and Nathan feel they are treated as animals under study rather than as humans with rich cultures, complex inner lives, original ideas, and varied emotions.
The presentation of Tíwé and Nathan as nearly the same—even down to their deaths at the hands of the Impostor—reinforces the idea that Indigenous peoples are a monolith, rather than subverting it. They are both static, flat characters, unchanging and relatively easy to describe despite their significant contributions to the text’s plot and themes. Their characterization thus reflects how the text acknowledges the problem of stereotyping Indigenous persons, but ultimately engages in the same practices.
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