The cast of characters in World's End is as complex as that of an eighteenth-century novel, which is the intention of the author, who makes constant allusion to past literature in all his novels. The sheer number of characters and the complexity of the relationships between them requires Boyle to place a three-page list of characters at the beginning of the novel. The list is divided into two halves, one half corresponding to the characters in the seventeenth century, and the other half corresponding to the characters in the twentieth century. Each half is further divided into four groups of characters: the Van Brunt family, the Van Wart family, the Kitchawank Indians, and the descendants of Ichabod Crane and other characters. This list is helpful, perhaps even necessary, as characters from different groups interact and as the names of seventeenth-century characters are borne by their descendants in the...