In my opinion, Poppy's intention while writing this book, including so many weird sexual and romantic twists, was to show how fragile our comprehension of the "normal" is. A lot of people see incest, or even homosexuality as a tabou, something that is unofficially forbidden to talk about and/or express in the society. We often don't want to speak/imagine these things "in action", because that is how we were raised. However, the characters of "Lost Souls" don't have the idea of this tabou. Most of them are not educated or just don't really take care of their lives. They weren't raised with this kind of tabou, which brings us to Poppy's possible point that our world could be the same, where the kind of relationships shown in the book would be acceptable and not seen as something abject, if we wouldn't be conditioned to look at it the other way. The book also has a lot of "returning of the opressed" elements, wheather it is the fact that Nothing always felt like he didn't belonged where he was living or that since he found out that his parents weren't really his parents he was wishing to escape his town and find his real family. Steve and Ghost are also having these feelings throughout the book. Steve, always thinking of the day when he raped Ann and thinking what could've happened if he wouldn't done it. Ghost, always having these visions and dreams of other people, their voices that are haunting him Also after he killed Zillah, he was still thinking about this event for a long time. There are many more examples of the return of the opressed in the story, as well as other different Gothic elements. As Zoe said, we could write a whole essay about it ( which we will :/ ) ! In whole, I enjoyed this reading and this style of writing definetly catched my interest enough to proceed reading these kind of stories! -Evghenia
