Chapter 2 Summary

Dwayne is a widower who has an unusually tight bond with his pet dog, a crippled Labrador named Sparky. Dwayne employs an African-American house servant named Lottie Davis.

Kilgore has a pet parakeet named Bill. Kilgore allows himself to believe that mirrors are actually thin spots between alternative realities, and he refers to mirrors as 'leaks'. Kilgore is a fairly curmudgeonly man, aged sixty-five. One of his science fiction novels, Plague on Wheels, tells the story of a society of living automobiles who poison their own atmosphere and destroy their own culture before becoming extinct. Like virtually all of Kilgore's early works, the book was published as filler material in a volume thatfeatured explicit pornography entirely unrelated to the text.

Chapter 2 Analysis

Dwayne's character is further established as an affluent, but increasingly deranged man. The mental image of Dwayne rolling around on the...