Matty Pemulis and his Da

This is the book's most naked account of paternity turned predatory, and the horror is carried entirely by the father's rhetoric. Every sentence in the assault is built out of the vocabulary of fatherly love — a Da's right to hold his son, a Da's daily back-breaking labor, a Da wanting to "show his son some love" — and each one is bent one degree past its meaning so the child's terror becomes the insult that licenses the act. The father never finishes the word he is daring Matty to think ("nothing more than a," "taken for a"), so the son is made to supply the obscenity himself and then to feel guilty for having supplied it. Matty grasps early that his fear is fuel — "his being afraid fueled the thing somehow" — and later, with what the raw keeps calling "maturer perspective," that nothing he did or felt ever mattered, that the event "was laid out before the first slim line of doorlight broadened." The predatory pole of the theme is a father who uses the grammar of love to do the opposite of loving, and who arranges it so the son cannot even locate where the line was crossed.