It’s haunted by death—both the little one and the one we’d prefer not to think about.
The world, of course is always ending, and it always has been. It’s one of the sharper moments in White’s writing, which slips between acute caricatures and easy targets, to observe that Harper’s anxieties aren’t ipso facto superior to Cameron and Daphne’s obliviousness. Sure, they’re insulated to an absurd extent—not only do they not read the news, Harper fumes, “they don’t even.” But she’s got her blind spots as well, so focused on the outside world she can’t see herself at all.
isn’t a whodunit, because we don’t know who got done, but it evolves like a mystery, coaxing us into one understanding of its characters, then making us think we’ve gotten them all wrong, and then that maybe that’s wrong, too.