IJ study archive

Orin's Phoenix morning (pp. 45–46)

quote

he’s never come anyplace close to the conscious horror Himself had somehow developed about the Southwest’s black widows and their chaotic webs—the widows are all over the place, both here and Tucson, spottable on all but the coldest nights, their dusty webs without any kind of pattern

Context

Orin measures his own dislikes against his father's terrors and comes up short — his spider-aversion is "more like unconsciously" felt, nothing like the full "conscious horror" JOI built around the black widow. It's inheritance by dilution: the son carries a faint version of the father's signature dread (the widow that shadows JOI's whole biography — cf. the father's spider-death obsession in scene 020), enough to register the family resemblance, not enough to be crippled by it. The chaotic patternless webs are the father's private monster; Orin gets only the outline.

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