Oh, this is such a good book. I am left weeping over a man who is framed on every page as egotistical, self-centered, narcissistic. And to the target audience, a teenager with macabre interests and no doubt a handful of trauma to spark such an interest, they would be angry with Pellinore Warthrop, likely reminded of an emotionally absent parent just as I was. They would not understand the nuance of his person. But I'm grown now, I haven't read this in nearly ten years, and I now can spot very well that this doctor is no more than a boy himself, and he will never grow to be more than that. And somehow, this is more tragic and distressing to me than a man being eaten alive by maggots.
Pellinore Warthrop and Will Henry make me so inconsolably sad. They're both children. Yes, they've at least twenty years between them, but they're children. Two little boys who feel unwanted and unloved, and one is left to care for another when he was never cared for himself. Children cast forever in their fathers' shadows, waiting to be eaten alive by madness or monsters. And I somehow I get the feeling they would both prefer the monster.
