Family

The complex love found in dysfunctional novels sits at the heart of the novel. Chloe grows up in what she thinks is a loving house. She has deep and nurturing relationships with her father, mother, and brother. The only problem in her world is that she has an irrational fear of monsters. When she is 12, she is shocked when her father confesses to the murder of six teenage girls. This shatters Chloe’s perfect image of her loving father and destroys her whole family. Even two decades later, Chloe has a difficult time reconciling the loving memory she has of her father with the idea that he is a coldblooded murderer: “I remember crying after I had caught my first fish, its little puckered lips gasping as my father dug his fingers into its gills, trying to stop the bleeding. We were meant to eat it...