“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it.”

Flynn establishes the tone of the novel and Libby’s narrative voice from the very beginning. Her belief that her family’s blood is to blame for her temperament foreshadows the struggles she will have with her family. It also suggests to readers that Ben has the same problem, implying he is capable of murder.

“I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there—hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body—a Libby that’s telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out.”

This statement shows the internal struggle that characterizes Libby throughout the novel: her belief in her inherent badness versus her desire to create a better version of herself. She connects the murders with her stunted growth, both physically and emotionally, and believes that she has to erase the past in order to move on. By the end of the novel, she learns to accept the past, rather than hiding from it.

“He took off his hat, and on his head was a jet-black crown of hair, ruffed like an old Labrador. It was such a shock, like swallowing ice water too quickly, her red-headed boy, Ben’s defining characteristic, gone. He looked older. Mean. As if this kid in front of her had bullied the Ben she knew into oblivion.”

The first disturbing incident in the novel is Ben coloring his hair. The change is sudden and without explanation, so his family does not know what to think. The description of Ben looking mean and aggressive foreshadows violence and makes the change ominous. Flynn uses irony here because Diondra, a character who has not yet appeared in the story, is engineering Ben’s