Chapter 1: Ash

The opening line of the chapter immediately alerts the reader to the genre of the novel, magic realism, by orienting the reader’s attention to the supernatural. Written in the first person, Ash is a story about a son (Levi) recalling how his mother had returned to life after her cremation, an occurrence that is not abnormal in the McAllister family, where around a third of the females have returned, but never the men. The chapter introduces sister Charlotte and their estranged father, with whom the siblings believe their mother had unfinished business, hence her return. The mother’s reincarnated form was as a fern with skin of moss and tree fronds growing from her back, which, upon seeing her husband and being touched by him, burst into flame before she turned into ash for a second time. Arnott provides a rich and detailed description of the McAllister women’s returning forms, enlivening them with elements of the Tasmanian landscape, including blue gums, abalone, Bennett’s wallaby and dolerite, a theme that recurs throughout the novel. Initially upset by his mother’s second death, the son believes he has now accepted it but is concerned about Charlotte, who has responded by fixating on nature, trees and plants, currawong calls and whale spray, and falling ‘into fits of uncontrolled screaming’.  Concern for his sibling, and how she will return to him, prompts the brother to look for a coffin so he can bury Charlotte. At this stage, Arnott leaves unresolved whether Charlotte is actually dying or whether her brother intends to take matters into his own hands.

Chapter 1: Ash Quotes

Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. (Levi) Chapter 1

When she’d wandered back into her living room she immediately started shedding sheets of paperbark all over the carpet, while an ornate crown of bluegum branches burst from her head and the furred tail of a Bennett’s wallaby flopped out from beneath her dress. (Levi, about his great-aunt Margaret’s reincarnation) Chapter 1

They all had their reasons for returning – unfinished business, old grudges, forgotten chores. Once they’d done what they came back for they trudged back to the landscape that had re-spawned them, and we never saw them again. (Levi) Chapter 1

I wondered what form she would take when she returned to me … (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 1

I started looking for a coffin, and I swore to bury her whole and still and cold. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Salt

Written in the third person, Salt opens with fisherman Karl line fishing off the Hawley headland. He reminisces about the ultimate fishing experience, beyond the break waves, hunting for the legendary Oneblood tuna. It is a feat that combines the strength of a man and a seal in bringing, given the catch is twice their combined weight, and a myth that invites the reader to suspend reality and believe that a man and a seal could hunt together, and that they could catch a tuna that weighed approximately 450 kilograms. Fishermen had been raising seals from pup stage and partnering with him in the hunt since before records were kept. Karl recalls the details of his partnership with his seal.

It had taken just two days for Karl and his New Zealand fur seal to bond, the seal coming to rest his face in the palm of Karl’s extended hand, after which the pair had headed off to hunt tuna. However, it would be several years before they would have success, not due to a lack of knowledge of how to kill a tuna, which Karl and his seal knew full well and which Karl outlines with precision. Karl took a fishing charter job to earn income and had been unsurprised when, during a charter, he witnessed the McAllister grandmother rise from the tide.

Karl’s parents had moved away when he was around 23 and left him their cottage, into which Karl moved, and was later joined by his love interest, Louise. Karl knew that if he was to become serious about Louise, he would need the approval of his seal so, taking her out on the dinghy, Karl has Louise meet his seal. As with Karl, the seal eventually came to rest his face against Louise’s outstretched palm. Three months later, Karl and Louise married and Karl and his seal caught their first Oneblood.

Karl’s first Oneblood was sold to a Japanese wholesaler, Oshikawa, except for the guts and head, which were reserved for his seal as was custom. After their third Oneblood catch, Karl quit his charter job to hunt tuna every day, and the pair went on to catch between six and ten Onebloods annually for the next decade. Karl’s seal had grown to 160 kilograms but was still sprightly. With the addition of his two daughters, it seemed that Karl’s life could not get any better.

The narrative takes on a sombre note as Karl recalls a fishing expedition with his seal in which they were confronted by three orca whales making clicking sounds. It soon became clear the orcas did not want Karl and his seal’s tuna catch, they wanted Karl’s seal. The seal tried to protect Karl, but the combined strength of the orcas was too great and Karl looked on as his seal succumbed to the vicious attack.

The thought of re-partnering with another seal as other fisherman had done made Karl sick, so he retired comfortably and kept himself occupied by taking his family on nature trips. However, nature’s therapy was not able to console the grief for his seal, as all he saw ‘through the grass was a seal hitting the sea, and all he heard in this high empty sky was a pulsing rhythm of underwater clicks’, demonstrate that the profound loss of a loved one can be immobilising. Karl hopes that something ‘would swim up to him’, metaphoric of his seal, and enable him to find purpose again.

Returning to the scene at the start of the chapter, Karl heads back to the cottage with his catch of fish and, seeing a young man sorting through driftwood, strikes up a conversation. Karl learns the young man’s name is Levi and that he is looking for wood to build his sister’s coffin, linking to the story from Chapter 1.

Chapter 2: Salt Quotes

… the Oneblood Tuna. A man couldn’t hunt it alone, and neither could a seal, but together they could kill a beast twice as heavy as the two of them combined. (Karl) Chapter 2

Sometimes he chased a tuna for twenty or thirty metres, but always broke off and returned to Karl, a doggish smile hanging from his whiskers. (Karl’s seal) Chapter 2

When fish and seal have come within three metres of the sea’s lid it is time for the human to act. And it’s not hard, really, not when compared with what the seal has done, but it takes precision, and speed, and a certain calmness. (catching a Oneblood) Chapter 2

His other half lay sleeping beside him. (Karl and his seal after their first Oneblood kill) Chapter 2

Oshikawa had wanted the whole, animal, guts and head and all, but Karl had laughed – those parts belonged to the seal, and everyone in the fish industry knew it …Chapter 2

They took turns gripping its tail in their teeth and flinging their heads left to right, over and over again, using the hard lid of the ocean to break Karl’s seal into ragged chunks of brown-red meat. (the orcas) Chapter 2

Soon the clicks would stop, and he would stop hearing his seal hit the sea, and an idea or direction or purpose would swim up at him. (Karl) Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Sky

Sky opens with Charlotte, Levi’s sister, running because she has just been reading a book about coffins, The Wooden Jacket, that was next to a notepad with her physical dimensions written in her brother’s handwriting. She is unsure if Levi means her harm or not but is absolutely certain of the fact that she will be cremated and not buried. She hitches a ride to the docks and finds an upturned dinghy under which she spends the night. She dreams of happier days with her mother and brother, having fun at the beach, and awakes when she feels the warmth of native river rat, a rakali, nestled against her stomach.

Riding south in a bus, Charlotte ponders how different her and Levi’s reactions to their mother’s death have been. Charlotte is no longer able to deal with Levi’s look of judgment and control at how she expresses her grief, by ‘sobbing in the gullies, flinching at the wind and throbbing in the fields’. In her opinion, it is he who needs the help, not she, given his apparent lack of sorrow and pain and plan to bury his sister.

The bus Charlotte is travelling in breaks down and the bus company arranges accommodation for the passengers at the only accommodation in town. In the bar, Charlotte overhears a couple of miners talking about a place down south, a tin-mine town. The miners join Charlotte at her table and they drink beer until last call. Outside her room, Charlotte pursues an encounter with one of the miners until the other miner turns up and the experience turns unpleasant. She violently pushes them away and feels  ‘a burst of heat that blazes for a volcanic moment before disappearing’. The men leave and, before going to bed, Charlotte writes down the name of the tin-mine town they had told her about: Melaleuca.

The next morning, Charlotte is back on the repaired bus heading south through Hobart before arriving in Kingston. The men from last night are nowhere in sight and Charlotte is nursing a severe hangover. Kingston is not far enough south for Charlotte so she takes another bus to Franklin where she starts to feel calm and takes this as a sign that she is heading to where she needs to be. She spots Melaleuca on a map in a store and is informed by the shopkeeper that the only transport there is by boat or plane, there being no road in. Charlotte obtains the name of a boat that’s heading out and knocks on the outside of its hull. A grey-haired man emerges and agrees to take Charlotte to Melaleuca the following day.

Chapter 3: Sky Quotes

Charlotte will burn, tomorrow or in half a century, but she will burn. Chapter 3

She does not trust her father. (Charlotte) Chapter 3

This look of control. This look of I need to do something; she needs my help, when really (as far as Charlotte is concerned) he is the one who needs help, because what was she doing but grieving? (about Levi) Chapter 3

Their mother was dead. What does it matter what form or sound her grief takes? Chapter 3

Charlotte is wandering the main road of Franklin and thinking to herself, more with pictures and feelings than words, that she is getting closer to wherever she needs to be. … And Charlotte is calm too, just for being there. Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Iron

Iron is a third-person narrative from the perspective of a river god known as the Esk God, who takes the form of the water rat, or rakali, that had snuggled up next to Charlotte under the dingy in the previous chapter. He had been enjoying the heat that emanated from her. The Esk God (taking its name from the South Esk River) has been around since time immemorial, before the white settlement of Australia and even the First Nations people, and knows all their history. He has witnessed all the callous effects of human industry on his rivers; ‘… he could see the iron they sunk into his rivers, building dams, dropping anchors, hooking fish’, and his all-knowingness about humans extends to an understanding of why they take on supernatural forms, such as Charlotte’s reincarnation which the Esk God foresees. The river god is pleased he had allowed Charlotte to live, having sensed a purpose to ‘the blaze in her gut’ that had kept him warm. He also did not want to pick a fight with her father, tipping the reader to the fact that Charlotte’s father is a powerful entity.

The Esk God is swimming upriver towards the river’s source, ‘the mountain that the dark apes called turbunna and the pale apes called Ben Lomond’, to where the Cloud God is, his creator and meaning for living. The Esk God loves the Cloud God, knowing its existence depends on her, and frequently imagines what form she takes, hoping he will see a glimpse of her face today. Swimming further upriver, he gets angry at the Trevallyn Dam and decides to soothe his rage ‘by nipping screws out of the hull of an idle jetski’. He tastes the run-off lime and nitrogen of land practices he cannot influence, his dominion limited to the water and thinks about the fate of other land and water gods that have been impacted by the effects of human expansion, such as the extinction of the Hunt God, a reference to the Tasmanian Tiger. The Esk God contemplates how well he has survived, his rhetorical questioning of ‘who could kill a river?’ is foreboding, in light of the fact that the sustainability of the natural environment is dependent on the activity of humans.

With only an hour to his destination, the Esk God’s destiny is interrupted when, having stepped out of his domain and onto land to feed on a yabby, he is trapped in an iron cage that had been submerged in the mud. Self-assured of his god powers, he is surprised at his inability to free himself from the pale face captor’s grip. The captor produces a knife and slashes the Esk God’s neck. The Esk God rises out of the water rat’s body, floating upwards on a thermal draft, and realises he will finally see the Cloud God’s face.

Chapter 4: Iron Quotes

He had been here longer than the loud pale apes, longer even than the quieter dark ones who had arrived earlier. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

… he could see the iron they sunk into his rivers, building dams, dropping anchors, hooking fish. He had learned the colour and the shape of their callousness, but he could not stop them, for his power was limited to the rivers, while they swamped over everything. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

Without the Cloud God where would be no Esk rivers, and without the rivers there would be no Esk God. Chapter 4

He was wise enough to know that his fury would not help the river or stop the apes, so he continued on, soothing his rage in a simple, humbly way – by nipping screws out of the hull of an idle jetski. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

But the Esk God remained, and the Esk God thrived, for who could kill a river? Chapter 4

The Cloud God would be waiting for him, high on the peaks and plateaus where she poured her sky water down the slopes and into his rivery veins. (the Esk God) Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Fur

This chapter contains a series of letters between Levi and Mr Hough, the author of The Wooden Jacket, the book about coffins. Levi references the book in his letter and requests the assistance of Mr Hough in procuring a coffin for his sister. The letter is responded to with disdain and foul language; Mr Hough furious that Levi is harassing him in the quiet life in nature he has built. Although Mr Hough could care less about Levi or Charlotte’s situation, he accepts Levi’s request because it comes with the payment of $5000 and because he is facing bankruptcy.

Mr Hough appears somewhat delusional, believing the Country Woman’s Association to be a terrorist organisation and boasting about being ‘the world’s finest coffin maker’. His use of ‘high-grade wombat pelts’ for the coffin inlay, a blur between fact and fiction, leaves the reader speculating as to whether such a practice could exist or making an ethical comparison to the practice of harvesting the pelts of other animals, such as minks and foxes. Mr Hough agrees to build Charlotte’s coffin despite his repeatedly expressed abhorrence of Levi.

Levi ups his payment by an additional $22,000 for the work and provides Charlotte’s measurements as requested. Mr Hough requests to know what Charlotte is dying from to which Levi confirms his sister is otherwise well and his intentions for the coffin are not to bury her but simply to have physical proof that when she does pass away, she won’t be cremated.

In yet another condescending response, Mr Hough proceeds to take Levi through the various timber types and their differing reactions when they are filled with corpses and interred in the earth. He decides on snowgum, his choice for those who die young, as it fossilises and preserves their beauty. In a twist, Mr Hough mentions he won’t be using wombat inlay due to a problem with his suppliers but that instead he will use water rat fur. He had recently caught a water rat in the South Esk River that runs past his homestead only a few days ago, and marvels at the heat that emanates from its pelt. The reader will understand this to be the water rat from the previous chapter and that, in some supernatural transfer, it had received Charlotte’s heat.

Levi writes that Charlotte has not returned but that the police are looking for her and offers Mr Hough help with the coffin. Mr Hough responds that all Levi can do for him is poison the South Esk as it appears that every species of river life is out to kill him whenever he goes within twenty metres of the water. The coffin will be finished in a month.

Levi writes that he’s hired a private detective and is met with a response that Mr Hough cannot complete the coffin. It seems that the river creatures, yabbies, herons, eels, drakes and water rats, have encroached further onto Mr Hough’s property and are now harassing him in his home. The water rats that are digging at the foundation of his home have multiplied in number so that Mr Hough now fears for his life.

Mr Hough offers Levi the half-finished coffin, despite the unpleasantness of having to meet him. He will, however, not give up the water rat pelt since it has become his sole comfort and keeps him warm during disturbing dreams. Levi’s payment is no longer needed since he believes the taxman will never get him while the river creatures plague his doorstep.

Chapter 5: Fur Quotes

… I assume you are aware, is actually a terrorist group … (Thurston to Levi about the Country Women’s Association) Chapter 5

I use high-grade wombat pelts sourced from a premium supplier in the far south, ensuring all my coffins are more luxurious than a royal featherbed. (Mr Hough) Chapter 5

I am besieged in my own home by the creatures of the river. (Mr Hough) Chapter 5

They have started digging at the foundations of my house like dogs at a beach. (Mr Hough about water rats) Chapter 5

At night I lay it over my pillowcase, where it heats my cheek throughout all my fitful dreams. (Mr Hough, the water rat pelt) Chapter 5

Chapter 6: Ice

Ice is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the female detective whom Levi hires to find Charlotte. Referred to only as ‘the detective’, she is cynical, a chronic gin drinker, and dislikes anything pretty. The detective doesn’t trust Levi but takes the assignment as she needs the money and doesn’t flinch at the backstory Levi provides to Charlotte’s running. She insists on Levi providing their father’s address, experience having shown her that when a girl goes missing, ‘you generally check her dad’s place first’.

The detective arrives at Jack’s house, which overlooks the stunning Tamar Valley, but no one is home. She notices the ‘ring of charcoal’ in front of the house, twinging as she remembers Levi telling her that his mother had burned twice. The detective’s twinges are something she has come to rely upon, viewing them as her enhanced ability, an accurate predictor that something is about to go wrong.

The detective pays a visit to Senior Detective Malik at the police station, the lead on Charlotte’s case, and the detective’s ex-husband with whom she still shares an easy relationship. Malik has helped the detective solve many cases over the years and she trusts his instincts. Malik thinks Charlotte’s either holed up somewhere or headed to mainland Australia. He gives the detective the file and fills in more of the backstory to Jack and Edith McAllister. Apparently, Jack just turned up one day, ‘flush with cash’, and decided to stay, Edith having ‘given him a reason to stay’. The detective experiences a hard twinge on hearing about Jack, and is surprised when for the first time nothing bad happens.

The detective heads to Tunbridge, following Malik’s lead about the two men Charlotte met at the pub. She locates the men and lets them chat her up, much like Charlotte had done, so that she could get the information she wanted. The detective entertains the mens’ sexual advances until the point at which she can divert the conversation towards Charlotte. The pair tell her how Charlotte seemed into them but pulled out at the last minute, burning one of them on the wrist, despite not having a lighter or anything. They said she was headed to Melaleuca, enjoying the fact that they’d misinformed her it was still a tin mine, and that it was now a wombat farm. Having received the information she needed the detective leads the men on a little more before physically hurting them in order to get away. The detective doesn’t feel bad about hurting people sometimes, when she thinks about all the bad things that have happened to her.

While heading to Franklin to get more answers, the detective receives a call from Malik with more information on Jack. She twinges again. Apparently, Jack’s only identification is a driver’s licence; he has no birth certificate, passport, work history, or prior surname, having taken Edith’s surname. Further, Jack disappeared about the time Charlotte did. Malik’s main point is that having lived in the community for so long and being well liked, no one seemed to know anything concrete about him.

In Franklin, the detective locates the sailor who took Charlotte to Melaleuca and pays him for information, before she heads to Hobart to see a pilot friend Cindy, who owes her a favour and can fly her to Melaleuca.

As they descend, the detective and Cindy see a huge fire. After landing, Cindy heads for the huts to call the ranger while the detective is drawn to the fire in the field. In the ashen black area that extends for about 10 or 20 kilometres, she has a bewitching experience with a man carrying a backpack. The figure is not static, but changes in colour and shape. She has an accompanying electrifying twinge that shakes her from head to toe. As the man walks past her, she attempts to follow him, but is stopped in her tracks against her will as he warns her: ‘Stay away from my daughter’.

Chapter 6: Ice Quotes

You shouldn’t drink gin before you drive a sedan. But you also shouldn’t talk back to your mother, wear black with blue or sleep with loose men, and I’d done all those things plenty of times … (the detective) Chapter 6

It sure was pretty, all that light on all that water. I’m not interested in pretty things. (the detective) Chapter 6

Like his private-school manners were paved over something that had cracked. (the detective about Levi) Chapter 6

Skinny boy’s mother and all her twice-dead relatives didn’t make me blink. (the detective) Chapter 6

I don’t feel much at all. (the detective) Chapter 6

‘… They just say he looks ordinary, acts normal, and that they can’t imagine why a policeman would be interested in him. Then their eyes glaze over and they start talking about the footy or the weather’. (Malik to the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

Graham’s instincts were rarely wrong, and I believed his anxieties even more than I believed his tips. (the detective about Malik) Chapter 6

I’m not the best detective in the world, but I know how to find the right people to answer my questions. (the detective) Chapter 6

These eyes – shifting, unknowable points of whiteness and iris and heat – froze me to the ground. (the detective about Jack) Chapter 6

The sight of his shrinking back, changing colour and shape before my eyes from this distance, drew a curtain of exhaustion over me. (the detective) Chapter 6

Chapter 7: Feather

The chapter is a series of entries taken from the diary of Allen Gibson, the manager of the Melaleuca Farm Estate, and his predicament of wombat deaths on the farm that keep increasing. The nature of the injuries suggests it to be a bird, the wombats’ eyes having been plucked out, but as no raptor-like birds are native to the area, he determines the killer to be a human. Allen doubts that it could be farmhand Nicola, whom he observes to be as close to the wombats as he and who cries over the corpses, but also doubts it could be Charlotte, who despite losing control of herself at times, cares for the wombats even more than Nicola and cannot even look at the dead wombats but runs away screaming. Allen decides not to contact the farm owner Mrs Quorn yet for fear of being fired, the farm having become his home, the wombats his family. If only the distressing dreams that troubled his sleep would go away. The trio decide to take turns staying up all night beside the wombats.

The plan works for nearly a week, and no more wombats are lost but, on the seventh night, Allen falls asleep during his watch and awakes to find three more dead wombats. Hope that they are closer to the perpetrator arrives when new wombat deaths are accompanied by black feathers, which Allen determines belong to the black-faced cormorant that lives in a tree above the nearby grave of the farm’s founder, Derek Quorn. But Allen’s theory does not sit well with the farmhands, and the girls’ growing closeness makes Allen regard them with suspicion. The condition of the remaining wombats deteriorates when they stop eating grass which, together with the deaths, leads Allen to hatch a plan to kill the cormorant as he wants to be able to supply as many wombat pelts to the owner as was agreed upon. Arnott leaves unresolved the antithesis between the manager’s attachment to the wombats, whom he will subsequently be killing simply for their pelts. Allen’s recurring dreams of dead wombats, rather than horrifying him, now make him curious.

Allen has no luck trying to shoot the cormorant and, furthermore, with an increasing number of black feathers found around the wombat deaths, suspects more cormorants are arriving. His dreams take on sharper imagery; he envisions Melaleuca completely overrun by cormorants and, strangely, that he is being welcomed by them. He wakes from his dream to find he has slept on a bed full of cormorant feathers that he had collected earlier but couldn’t remember placing on his bed, and to a newfound hatred of wombats. He is furious that the farmhands have called the ranger who has arrived asking questions as to his wellbeing and why he hadn’t been in touch with the owner. Apparently, the girls have become scared of him and contacted the ranger to help them get a flight out. The manager turns on the ranger, his friend of many years, and with his shotgun in hand, orders him off the property. He later falls asleep on a growing heap of cormorant feathers that are amassing on his bed and decides he will go and see the leader of the cormorant in Old Quorn’s field, whom he believed would show him how to proceed.

The next day, Allen goes to see the cormorant but can’t locate him. He falls asleep and has another dream-vision in which he realises that it is in sleep that the cormorant materialises and Allen realises the immense joy of being in his presence. Allen is abruptly woken by a wombat nudging at his feet and, in fury, kills the wombat with his knife. The action unleashes his memories for all his previous killings of wombats and, as he hears the cormorant call, realises it is coming from within his own body; he understands that he and the cormorant have been joined. As hundreds of cormorants emerge from the old tin mine, Allen turns to a massacre of the remaining wombats.

Nicola sees Allen and before he can harm her, Charlotte intervenes. Then, to everyone’s surprise including her own, Charlotte leaks fire out of her eyes, ears and nostrils, the sides of her mouth and from under her fingernails. The fire quickly spreads and Allen runs, chased by Charlotte. Her fire catches him and he dives into the old tin mine.

Writing the final entry from the mine in which he’s been holed up for a week, Allen attributes the healing of his burns to the cormorant healing from within. Along with the healing, Allen has started to sprout cormorant feathers and his nose has become birdlike. Having at last found the solitude he had sought all his life, Allen keeps himself busy writing in his journal, while cormorants deliver him fresh fish every day. His strength is returning and he wonders if his feathers will one day be strong enough so he can fly.

Chapter 7: Feather Quotes

Hard-working, capable and diligent, she also displays a level and affection for the livestock that I have never seen in my twenty-odd years of farming. (Allen about Nicola) Chapter 7

After checking their skin for ticks every morning she brushes them, an inessential task that she revels in, murmuring in their ears, ruffling their necks as if they were pets. (Allen about Charlotte with the wombats) Chapter 7

And in the evenings she shepherds them into their burrows with a with a wordless song that lulls them into a state of hypnosis; as she sings they march sleepily towards her voice and tumble into their holes … (Allen about Charlotte with the wombats) Chapter 7

I cannot bear the thought of being taken away from the farm, or from Melaleuca. If the wombats are my family, then this place is my home. (Allen) Chapter 7

We had agreed to supply over five hundred premium-grade pelts to various clients, but at this rate we will be lucky to harvest even half that number. (Allen) Chapter 7

I would visit the leader of the cormorants, and then I would now how next to proceed. … He would show me the path. (Allen) Chapter 7

… as she yelled, a blue light began leaking from her eyes. (Allen about Charlotte) Chapter 7

Fire was pouring down her chin and chest in a cascade of burning vomit. (Allen about Charlotte) Chapter 7

Chapter 8: Cake

This is a chapter taken from a book by an Avoca town stalwart, hairdresser and member of the Country Women’s Association (CWA), Mavis Midcurrent. In it, Mavis pays homage to certain people and invites the reader into the life and times of a small town. She singles out a fuel pump attendant, a female mayor, a judge in the annual male beauty contest, the CWA, but the bulk of the narrative goes to the author, Thurston Hough. She describes the recluse’s hateful relationship with the entire town and alerts the reader to the fact he has died, the local wildlife having subsequently gnawed at his body. Furthering the central plot, she explains that it was Levi who found the body and alerted the police, and that he had also taken the water rat pelt Thurston had been clutching when he died. Her comment about Thurston being as ‘unpleasant in death as he was in life’ appears to be representative of the town and suggest there will be little grief experienced.

Chapter 8: Cake Quotes

… he was a terrible neighbour, an unpleasant person, and a poor citizen. (Mavis about Thurston) Chapter 8

A thin, jittery and softly spoken young man, he told the constable everything he knew in a dispassionate and polite matter, all while paying me the utmost respect. (Mavis about Levi, about Thurston) Chapter 8

But enough of Thurston Hough! He is as unpleasant in death as he was in life. (Mavis) Chapter 8