Lightning Bug has three main characters: Latha Bourne, Every Dill, and its mysterious narrator, Dawny/Donald who appears as two characters. Latha is a beautiful and exceptional woman. She looks, in the narrator's mind's eye, like Vanessa Redgrave in the 1966 film, Blowup. Although she has suffered severe losses, she harbors no bitterness. She is a single woman at one with herself and the world in which she lives. Her general store reflects her. With its plentitude of stock and the post office, it is, as is Latha, the heart of life in Stay More.

Harington has said that he wanted her to be different, a little "peculiar," character traits that are personified in her knowledge and belief in the traditional ways of Ozark life. Vance Randolph described these ways in his Ozark Magic and Folklore (1947, 1964), but Harington's experience in the Ozarks also gave him knowledge of customs, superstitions...