Billy Summers

Content Warning: This section references violence, including the murder of a child.

Billy Summers is full of good luck charms—objects that seem to have a magical significance for the characters who keep them. Billy in particular carries several talismans at different times. There is an extended discussion on the magic of charms and talismans in which the narrator explains that Billy “doesn’t want to lose the lappie any more than he wants to lose the copy of Thérèse Raquin he was reading when he came to this city […] Lucky charms are what they are […] the object matters” (143). They matter because they are tokens that stave off misfortune; keeping them implies a belief in a volatile universe but also, contradictorily, an ability to exert control. One object that illustrates this tension is the baby shoe Billy found on the ground after a mission in Fallujah in which he killed a local shopkeeper. Stooping to pick up the shoe from the ground saved his life, taking him out of the way of a bullet, and the shoe becomes both a talisman and the subject of frequent meditation: “His mind […] sideslips back to Fallujah and the baby shoe” (152). He keeps the shoe with him until just before the Funhouse incident, when he realizes that it is missing.