“I reached down carefully, my hands shaking. It was heavier than paper. Some kind of thin card. The back was perfectly white, but when I turned it over I realized that it was a photograph.

It took me a second to make sense of what I was seeing.

And when I did, I began to scream.”

These lines are an example of the text’s use of horror and suspense conventions to build a sense of dread. Though the novel doesn’t describe the photo’s horrific contents until much later, the allusion to Dan’s abject terror itself imbues tension in the plot. Since the chapter ends on these lines, the uncertain cutaway further adds to the atmosphere of fear and suspense.

“It is interesting to note how an event that becomes formative for a patient might appear utterly inconsequential to an observer. We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.”

Dan’s notes after meeting Richard Barber illustrate the ripple effects of a single encounter. Dan has been irrevocably changed by a single day in his life, the meeting with James.

“The loss ached inside me. There were so many things I could have said and done over the last few years. But my feelings for her were bound up in the horror of my encounter with the Pied Piper at the service station. It had become impossible to look at her without reliving the fear and shame and guilt I’d felt that day. Safer not to look at all.”

An example of the ripple effect of trauma, these lines show how the events at the service station continue to derail Dan’s life. Though he loves Sarah, he can’t act on his feelings since she’s linked with his painful memories of the service station. Rather than confront those memories, Dan chooses to stay away from Sarah.

“There is something small and pitiful about the remains. Fire diminishes a body, like a hand clenching slowly into a fist. But these remains seem tinier than most. Once upon a time, this was a living, breathing human being: someone full of motion and movement, love and laughter. But the remains in the undergrowth are so empty and still that it’s hard to square them with that idea, and the sight of them stirs familiar emotions inside him. The sadness at this loss of life. The frustration of wanting to protect someone, and it being far too late. The anger. I will find who did this to you, he thinks.”

These lines demonstrate North’s use of spare detail to evoke pathos and horror. The description of Rose’s body isn’t gory, but the comparison of a burned body to a shrunk fist creates a sense of terror and futility. John’s fury at the senseless crime shows his empathy for the vulnerable. His desire to protect whoever he can is also a manifestation of his guilt at missing the Pied Piper, who must have strolled right past the police officer in broad daylight on that fateful afternoon.

“Time passes.

That’s what it does, if you’re lucky. Which is exactly the kind of homespun aphorism that John has always despised and yet has found himself deploying more and more recently. I’ve gotten so old, he’ll think, and then a voice in his head will answer back: better than the alternative. But is it?”

Silence and isolation are recurrent motifs in the text, with characters caught in their separate lives, unable to connect with each other and the larger world. John’s isolation in these lines raises the real-life issue of loneliness among the elderly. Retired and living by himself on an island, and unable to express himself to his son, John feels stuck in life.

“Once again, the figure behind me said nothing. But then I heard a man’s voice, raised finally from my subconscious, but still so quiet for the moment that it was barely louder than a whisper. Isn’t it obvious? he said. And then a sigh, almost lost to the wind. I did it because I wanted to be seen.”

These lines show the textual emphasis on the motif of seeing and being seen. Characters in the novel often feel marginalized and angry when they’re rendered invisible. Here, the projection of the killer in Dan’s head tells him that they took Rose’s body into the woods because of a desire to be seen. This indicates that the killer wants to draw attention to something or someone long ignored, which turns out to be James.

“The whistling sound is a little louder than before. It’s a tune of some kind. There’s something familiar about it, even though he doesn’t think he’s ever heard it before. How can that be possible? And suddenly, everything feels off-kilter. The empty beach; the ethereal music. It’s as though when he rounded those rocks and left his mother behind him, he stepped out of the real world and into a different and more dangerous one.”

These lines exemplify the narrative’s emphasis on the supernatural aspect of reality. In the book, the supernatural realm of horror isn’t another dimension but solid reality itself. As James hears the Pied Piper’s whistle, he subconsciously realizes that he’s in danger, which alters his perception of the beach into a nightmarish world. James’s perception is also an example of the textual motif of a child’s intuition.

“What if he had paid a little more attention and noticed that something was wrong? It was an almost ubiquitous reaction to trauma, and right now he was wearing the guilt as plainly as the wax jacket he was pulling around himself against the cold.”

These lines contain unintentional irony since Dan attributes Aspinall’s shifty behavior to his guilt over failing to recognize that John was under stress. The truth, as it turns out, is that Aspinall is the one who abducted John and plans to kill him. Dan’s readiness to interpret Aspinall’s behavior showcases his tendency to project his emotions onto other people.

“Pay attention. Was that his voice or mine? I glanced around the car. My father had driven to his death in this vehicle, and yet it was as clean and well maintained as the house. There were no signs of disarray. Nothing that suggested a distressed state of mind. Nothing that—

Aspinall tapped on the window.”

As this passage shows, the text often uses foreshadowing to knit the plot together. Here, the warning voice in Dan’s head is an early indicator of Aspinall’s role in John’s disappearance since it asks Dan to be attentive right at the moment when Aspinall appears around the car.

“But he was so…angry. In my head, that’s all I can see of him: he’s reds and blacks. He’s fucking screaming. It’s just rage. And he keeps looking at me the whole time, like he wants me to see every second of it.”

One of the novel’s red herrings—a clue that is a misdirection—is that James is the killer in the present-day timeline. To reinforce this impression, the text explores the assumption that James would be angry at the world given the realism of Aspinall’s incandescent rage. Here, Darren Field’s description of the killer appearing in the red and black of rage fits well with the brewing hypothesis of a grown-up James out to torment those who failed him. The mention of reds and blacks is also an example of synesthetic imagery since Field describes Aspinall’s violent actions in terms of colors.

“Perhaps I was only imagining him saying that because it was what I wanted to believe. The truth was that, for years now, I had seen my father a handful of times a year, and spoken to him on the phone only occasionally in between. That wasn’t enough contact to know someone. People can hide things away from you in the spaces between seconds, never mind weeks and months.”

These lines illustrate the novel’s theme of The Complex Silence Between Fathers and Sons. Although Dan tries to recreate his father’s perspective in his head, he knows that this is a difficult task since he and his father communicate only sporadically and know little of each other. They may share love, but not words or feelings, so they remain locked in separate bubbles.

“It wasn’t a heavy book, but for some reason my arms still ached from the effort. Which was silly, really. I didn’t need to lie down; there was a chair I could sit in. And yet I always chose to read the book that way. Perhaps a part of me believed that it should be an uncomfortable experience.

That I deserved to suffer.”

Terrence O’Hare’s The Man Made of Smoke symbolizes memory, truth, and guilt in the novel. Dan’s manner of reading the book, holding it close to his face as he lies in bed, is telling: Its proximity suggests squaring with the painful truth, while its weight is the heft of guilt. By reading the details about the children in the book, Dan makes himself suffer since he blames himself for surviving while those boys died.

“Whenever John thought back to the months and years that followed that afternoon, he pictured the man’s grubby, broken fingernails reaching into the cracks in his family’s life and prizing everything apart.”

Although silence divides John and Dan, the father and son are doppelgangers in the text. Both are wracked by guilt and trauma following the events at the service station. Both grieve the loss of family, as shown through John’s image of the Pied Piper physically clawing away at their life.

“‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I even saw Robbie Garforth that day. I can picture his face, but maybe that’s because I saw the photograph afterwards, and then my mind edited him into my memories.’”

Sarah’s comment about Robbie illustrates the tricky nature of memory. The novel highlights how memory isn’t a monolith but a collage, especially in light of trauma. In addition, Sarah’s observation rings close to Dan’s truth: He has forced himself to think that the boy at the station was Robbie to provide the world with a concrete narrative.

“The boy who walks into the bathroom a moment later is about his own age, and the sight of him takes James’s breath away. It’s like staring at his own reflection—or into a mirror that shows what he could have been if things had been different. They stare into each other’s eyes for a second. And the boy sees him—he’s not like the others here. The boy knows instantly that something is wrong. Perhaps it’s because he’s a child too. Maybe it takes someone who hasn’t quite grown out of their own nightmares yet to recognize when they’ve just walked into someone else’s.”

James’s account of the moment he sees Dan is heartbreaking because of the brief, futile hope it offers, especially since the narrative has already established that there is nothing Dan could have done to help James. At the same time, the moment is significant because, unlike everyone else, Dan does “see” James, proving to James that he isn’t invisible.

“You could have saved us, he thinks. But you didn’t.

And after a moment’s hesitation, he takes the photograph out of his pocket and places it on the floor.

So that’s yours now.”

James’s act of leaving Robbie’s photograph for Dan symbolizes how trauma and pain pass from one person to another, in a chain. The act is also heroic since James is leaving behind proof of the Pied Piper’s crime right under the murderer’s nose.

“‘I don’t know why, but it’s the lights in the trees I remember most,’ Johnson said. ‘Maybe because everything else is too horrible. But it’s also because they seemed so out of place—like a fairy-tale. Like I was being taken away into a wood by a monster.’

‘There’s no such thing as monsters,’ I said.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you listen to a word I said?’”

The existence of monsters is an often-discussed topic in the novel. Dan maintains that monsters don’t exist. While he’s technically right, some actions of human beings can be so extreme that they appear monstrous and can only be described in such terms. Johnson reminds Dan of this; to Johnson, being abducted and forced to watch the torture and murder of another person is no different from being consumed by a monster.

“I kept looking at the closed door. It occurred to me what arrogance the Pied Piper must have had to leave the boy out here like that. There had been moments when the boy had been wandering the services all but unattended as well. It was hard to imagine possessing that degree of confidence and control.”

Dan’s second visit to the service station demystifies the space for him, making him realize that it’s just a busy, ordinary area. Given the environment of the service station, the fact that the Pied Piper strolled through it is even more galling. He realizes that the killer was confident about pervasive societal indifference and about his terrifying hold on James. Though James could have screamed or tried to run away, he didn’t do so because the Pied Piper’s psychological abuse must have made James believe that action was futile.

“You’ve got pretty good, my father said.

Thank you.

I wish you’d told me. I understand why you didn’t. But honestly, it would have been fine. We all have our own ways of coping with things, don’t we? And if mine was brute force, then what the hell. It worked for me.

There’s no shame in that.

No, I thought.

There isn’t.”

The conversation between Dan and the imaginary John marks a thawing of the silence between father and son and a move toward resolving misunderstandings. In Dan’s mind, John understands why Dan never told him about his love for boxing, but Dan no longer judges John for his “brute force” method. Since John is a figment of Dan’s imagination here, Dan is forgiving himself for misunderstanding his father.

“If he takes part in the killing in the morning then the last surviving fragment of him will be dead anyway. And once James realizes that, he feels a sense of resolve, that fluttering hope inside him replaced by a small core of steel.”

These lines show why James is the most heroic character in the novel. Faced with an impossible choice and a devil’s bargain, James decides to symbolically save his soul. Rather than turn into a replica of the Pied Piper, James effectively chooses a brutal, painful death and steps out through the door the Pied Piper deliberately left open.

“Until this moment, the man has been a monolith, a demon, a monster. But as he walks towards James now, the lights of the compound are bringing him into sharp relief, and it’s clear that he’s only ever been a man. Average height and build. His face is finally visible now, and the features that James can see there are unremarkable. While he’s still whistling his tune, it sounds small and silly now.”

Though the Pied Piper has been described as palpably evil by witnesses, James now sees that he’s just a pathetic, ordinary human being who enjoys hurting others. Diction like the descriptors “unremarkable” and “average” demystify the Pied Piper, whose whistling, which once seemed hypnotic to James, now seems “small” and “silly.” James’s renewed estimation of the Pied Piper suggests that James has accepted his fate and found courage through this acceptance. In addition, it illustrates the theme of The Ordinary Face of Evil.

“Just give a good account of yourself, he thinks.”

It’s unclear whose voice James hears in his head, but it tells him that what is important is that James did the right thing, even under unbearable duress. The use of “account” suggests that James will soon give testimony or tell the story of his last day, perhaps to his mother, Abigail. The account could even be to his soul or himself. The essence of the directive is that James remain true to himself so that he has clean hands in the afterlife.

“‘And then I heard him calling out to me. It was only for a second, but his voice was clear as day. He was shouting out for help. That’s when I saw the path in the trees.’

‘Which you followed.’

‘I did.’ Aspinall nodded. ‘And when I got there, it felt like I was home.’”

Aspinall’s perception of James’s voice is an example of the text’s use of supernatural detail to create an atmosphere of mystery. There is no rational explanation for Aspinall’s discovery of the Pied Piper’s murder farm, which makes the chain of events even more spooky. Aspinall hearing James’s voice is an instance of the voluble silence between fathers and sons, a recurrent motif in the text.