The Last Word

Between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, there is a short first-person article taken from H.G. Kane’s website, in which he claims that he gets his ideas for his novels from real-life tragedies.

At the beginning of this chapter, under the title “Excerpt from Murder Beach (Draft 1)” (119), the font and perspective change. The book draft is written in the third person and reflects the perspective of the killer.

In real life, Kane drives to Strand Beach, an area that he is familiar with, and parks in a lot near the off-road path that he will take to the house. There, he vapes and thinks about his first book. When he was nine, his mother paid a vanity press to publish Kane’s book, Propeller Head, which is about a boy named Harry whose head turns into a boat propeller; this allows him to take revenge on his bullies and abusers. Now, as Kane waits to attack Emma, he walks around the town and buys some barbed fishhooks.

The perspective and font shift back to Emma’s point of view, told in the third person. She suspects that Kane is trying to harm her dog with cuts of meat that have sharp objects in them.