Wraiths & apparitions (diction)

Long before the wraith actually appears, the novel salts its language with wraith-vocabulary. The thread runs further and earlier than Greg Carlisle traces it. It is flagged at first occurrence in the "fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through... corridors," and it accumulates through the early hauntings — "someone unauthorized in the... room with you," the Brockengespenst glossed "wraith," an apartment's "wraith-or phantom-like" quality. The diction keeps priming the reader: Schtitt twice calls Hal "revenant," Concavity lore speaks of "skull-deprived wraiths," and Mario is seen as an "apparition." It all pays off when the wraith itself arrives at the bedside with the grave-dream, and the LISLE and lid-licking clues assemble the Lyle-wraith case. The thread turns a stylistic tic into structure — the book was speaking of ghosts before it had one, so that the wraith's appearance feels less like an intrusion than a long-prepared return.