53 pages • 1 hour read
In the Woods
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Themes
The One Left Behind
Even though Rob has blocked the memory of how his friends disappeared, their absence colors his life. As an adult, he frequently wonders why he was the one left behind. Rather than seeing his trauma as a random accident, he draws several different self-damaging conclusions as to why he alone survived.
At one point, he blames the fact that he was heavier than his friends and couldn’t run as fast. That was why they left him behind on the day they disappeared. At another point, he feels he was somehow unworthy as a sacrifice:
Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish, and I wonder whether, whoever or whatever took Peter and Jamie away, it decided I wasn’t good enough. (435)
As the one left behind, Rob keenly feels the loss of his camaraderie with Peter and Jamie. He instinctively reconstructs this bond with Cassie. The parallel intensifies when Sam joins their circle. Their casual evening get-togethers come quite close to mimicking the warmth and pleasure Rob felt in the company of his childhood friends.
However, Rob can never forget that he lost his friends suddenly and without warning. He seems to fear that a similar loss might befall him at any time, and he inevitably orchestrates that loss himself. Rob is the one who distances himself from Cassie after their sexual encounter.
Although sleeping with Cassie could have been a sign of the growth of their relationship, Rob bound by an idealized vision of childhood friendships. On some level, he doesn’t want to move beyond that stage. Rob, through his own self-destructive choices, is once again left behind when Cassie forms an attachment to Sam. The two move forward in their lives without Rob.
The Mask of True Evil
Since Rob and Cassie are detectives, one would assume that they are familiar with the many forms that evil can take. However, neither one is particularly adept at spotting sociopathy when it’s staring them in the face. This is because a sociopath doesn’t look like a monster but a victim. Such people often campaign to win the sympathy of others by appearing in the guise of an injured innocent.
A person who is targeted by a psychopath most probably feels embarrassed afterward for not having recognized the signs. This embarrassment is magnified when the target is a police detective—a person whose job it is to spot suspicious behavior. Both Cassie and Rob seem totally undone by their experiences with wolves in sheep’s clothing.
When Cassie is asked the name of her sociopathic college friend, she calls him Legion. This quote from the New Testament refers to a host of demons. Cassie is encapsulating the diabolical nature of a person who lies, especially for fun. Although the encounter has marked Cassie for life, it allows her to spot a sociopath masquerading as an innocent.
Rob is shaken to the core when he recognizes Rosalind’s deception. He literally equates her false behavior with a mask of makeup. When they first meet, he admires how artfully she applies makeup. Once she confesses to her part in Katy’s murder, the mask drops away, and Rob can see her as she is:
For the first time I saw in starkly allegorical relief how ugly she was, without the layered makeup and the artfully tumbling ringlets: pouched cheeks, thin avid mouth pursed into a hateful smirk, eyes as glassy and empty as a doll’s. She was wearing her school uniform, shapeless navy-blue skirt and a navy-blue blazer with a crest on the front, and for some reason this disguise seemed to me the most horrible of all. (556)
The most unnerving aspect of sociopathy is that it allows a demon to hide in plain sight. Rosalind’s own father doesn’t recognize the depth of her depravity until it’s too late. She looks so normal.
Stolen Childhood
While the theme of loss pervades Rob’s consciousness and shapes his behavior as an adult, he also exhibits anger over the missing person’s incident. Rob feels that his childhood and that of his friends was stolen. He is convinced that all three were robbed:
The wave of pure outrage blindsided me […] I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day’s work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. (258)
His choice of name as an adult is significant. He was born Adam Robert Ryan but chooses to be known as Rob. His stolen childhood is embedded in his name and ever-present in his awareness.
Because Rob chooses to focus so intensely on outrage for his childhood losses, he fails to see that life has given him a new opportunity to forge the same kind of bond with Cassie and Sam. Every evening, he sits barefoot with a drink in his hand, swapping the day’s work stories with them. They are new incarnations of Peter and Jamie. Rather than accept this second chance at happiness, Rob refuses to move on from the initial theft.
Rob also projects his own feelings onto Katy. Her childhood was stolen too. Irrationally, he wants to stop the forensics team from taking anything else away from her:
For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs’ hands away, shout at the hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. (41)
In pursuing the Devlin case when he knows he shouldn’t, Rob isn’t looking for closure but for compensation. As a child, he was unable to find anyone to pay for the loss of his friends. As an adult, he wants to make someone pay for the theft of Katy’s life.
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