Billowing shapes

Billowing is the book's horror-harbinger — a slow outward swell of fabric or darkness that signals dread is arriving. It first appears at pp. 60-61, and thereafter fear keeps attaching to things that move this way: a roommate's curtains, a flag-curtain at Joelle's window (p. 591), and above all Joelle's veil, seen "billowing" as she listens to freebase descriptions twenty-four hours off her overdose (p. ~376). The motif fuses with the Entertainment itself, whose only glimpsed frames show "a veiled woman… the billowing veil" (p. ~549), and with the anhedonic It that "billows… and wraps in Its black folds" (pp. 692-698) and rides Kate Gompert's "billowing shaped black sailing wing". What curtains, veils, and the black wing share is a soft, weatherless motion that reads as menace: the image tells you something is about to descend before the scene names it.