Content Warning: This section refers to domestic abuse, child abuse, and colonial trauma.

“But on days when the sky surges out of the mountains, gun-metal and wild, and the wind turns the grass into a tide, if you stand on the river bottom looking up at the bluff, you might imagine that what you see is not a church gone to hell but a ship leaned at the keel, sparkling in the light, pitching over the horizon in search of a new world.”

This passage demonstrates King’s use of imagistic, figurative language in conjuring the landscape of Truth and Bright Water. The imagery associates the church with Bright Water’s colonial past—the church becomes a “ship […] in search of a new world”—while also situating the building as a piece of the landscape, almost subsumed. This foreshadows the church’s disappearance after Monroe’s interventions.

“‘Saw the Cousins.’ Lum grabs the fur at the back of Soldier’s neck and pulls it into a wad. ‘Up by the church.’”

This passage highlights King’s ability to introduce information into the narrative without explaining it. At this stage in the story, the Cousins have not yet been explained, and they will go unexplained for a few chapters more. The natural flow of conversation and description, uninterrupted by expository asides to the reader, helps create the novel’s naturalistic, slice-of-life sensibility.

“I pointed out that Sylvester Stallone wasn’t blond and neither was Jim Carrey, but Lum said that being white was the same thing as being blond.”

King makes ample use of allusion in order to render Tecumseh’s viewpoint. These specific film references not only situate this narrative in a specific historical moment but also characterize Tecumseh by showing what types of films he watches and what types of masculinities he has exposure to. The association of masculinity with whiteness speaks to the ways in which Western gender norms have influenced colonized cultures, linking together