55 pages • 1 hour read
The Chain
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Themes
How Love and Parenthood Complicate Morality and Rationality
To function properly, The Chain depends on the specific morality of its “links”—victims of coercion. The Chain requires people to commit actions that they would find immoral under usual circumstances, such as kidnapping and murder. In order to force the links to do these things, the crime ring puts loved ones’ lives at stake, testing how far people will go to rescue their loved ones. Leaders Ginger and Olly assume human nature will help The Chain run itself—and for the most part, it does. As twins with an abusive father who killed their mother and kidnapped them, Ginger and Olly have a complicated moral code: They love each other and respect their grandfather, but care little for anyone else. With The Chain, Ginger and Olly prey on others’ loyalty to their own loved ones. As Rachel observes, “The Chain is a cruel method of exploiting the most important human emotion—the capacity for love—to make money” (336). Although most links in The Chain are less morally corrupt than Ginger and Olly, most of them still demonstrate how love—especially parental love—complicates morality.
In order to perform a successful kidnapping, Rachel and other links have to target someone who is loved—someone who has family willing to pay a ransom and kidnap someone else to replace their own loved one. To save her daughter Kylie, Rachel must kidnap a child (Amelia Dunleavy) and traumatize a family (Mike and Helen Dunleavy) who do not deserve such a fate. She reasons that children make for easier targets because they’re small and trusting, and most parents will protect them no matter the cost or nature of their own relationship. This thought seems to suggest that parental love is more reliable than romantic love or other types of love, but this type proves “unreliable” in the novel, because parents such as Rachel and Heather exhibit unprecedented violence when push comes to shove. For example, while Rachel feels guilty over kidnapping Amelia, she and Pete draw a line between her and Kylie—prioritizing Kylie. Kylie’s own kidnapper, Heather, goes as far as to kill a police officer to ensure her son’s survival.
Because love also complicates rationality, Olly reasons that he and Ginger shouldn’t mix business with personal matters unless necessary—as doing so would make The Chain unstable. Ginger repeatedly ignores Olly’s warnings and ends up compromising The Chain due to her attraction to Rachel’s ex-husband, Marty. In other words, her search for romantic love ruins her platonic love for her brother, the one person she truly cared for.
The Persistent and Compounding Effects of Trauma
At the beginning of the novel, Rachel is no stranger to hardship and trauma, even before The Chain enters her life. She’s been through a divorce and her breast cancer is in remission, so she’s still healing from these events when her daughter, Kylie, is kidnapped. Likewise, Pete is struggling with military-related trauma and uses heroin to cope. When Kylie is kidnapped, both characters link this experience to their own traumatic experiences. As Rachel observes, “It reminds her again of the chemo days. The numbness. The feeling of plunging into the abyss and falling, falling, falling forever” (61). Trauma compounds when more experiences are added to it before characters have a chance to process their emotions in a healthy way.
When Kylie is kidnapped and chained in a basement, she undergoes significant trauma of her own—like Rachel and Pete do while trying to save her life. The trio experiences relief once Kylie is home again, but the effects of this shared trauma are far from over. Under normal circumstances, the trio would be able to seek medical attention, therapy, legal justice, and closure without fear of retaliation—and even then, the process of healing could take a while. But because of The Chain’s reach, this healing is inhibited because the characters aren’t allowed to share their experiences with anyone other than themselves. With no healthy outlet, trauma compounds. Rachel, Pete, and Kylie’s physical and emotional symptoms continue to worsen until Rachel decides to risk her life to end The Chain for good.
To illustrate the lasting effects of trauma, links repeatedly reflect that “it’s over” or they are “off” The Chain once they get their own child back; however, they’re repeatedly reminded that their involvement is never “over.” Just as Rachel’s cancer-related memories and Pete’s war flashbacks come back to haunt them in the present, The Chain haunts them as well: The crime ring resurfaces through requests and threats, to maintain its hold on past links. While reckless, Rachel decides to risk her life to end The Chain because this is the only way to ensure her family’s well-being; in a similar vein, former link Erik risks his life to identify The Chain leaders as he and his daughter share trauma. After Rachel, Pete, and Kylie eliminate The Chain in a gunfight, their trauma doesn’t disappear, but it does get easier to manage. As Rachel notes, “The splinter will always be there, of course. The darkness. They’ll never quite be able to get that out. It’s part of [Kylie] now, part of all of them” (350). By defeating The Chain, she has saved her family from having to suffer in silence.
The Nature of Monstrosity
The nature of monstrosity is a common theme in many horror and thriller novels. Classic “monsters” and villains are external threats, individual beings who can be caught and defeated—such as a serial killer. However, some monsters prove more complex, more internal, amplifying characters’ fear of the unknown. Monsters like vampires and werewolves, who spread monstrosity by infecting others with it, embody a double threat. Not only do they pose a physical threat, but they threaten victims with the power of transformation, of making victims monsters themselves. In some cases, these victims-turned-monsters turn on their loved ones. Overall, this type of monster is ever-increasing in its reach.
In The Chain, the villain or monster is not a single entity, but a growing “chain” of monstrosity that contains an unknown number of victims—“links.” Still, there is a root to this evil—Ginger and Olly, the crime ring’s creators and leaders who seek profit. However, the evil does not end with the twins. Once the twins are killed, the immediate danger of The Chain is defeated, like a slain vampire or werewolf. However, The Chain is a different beast in that it creates a bigger monster that still acts as a single entity, rather than creating more of its kind; however, this isn’t to say a similar crime ring won’t emerge in the characters’ future. Each link is both victim and perpetrator, even young Kylie: “That’s what The Chain does to you. It tortures you and makes you complicit in the torture of others” (219). In becoming a link, part of a bigger monster, there is not only the danger of being harmed, but being forced to harm others.
The Chain also produces evil beyond its creators’ intentions (assigned ransoms and kidnappings). Sometimes, links (like Heather) commit murders without being instructed to, simply because this makes it easier to complete their tasks. Some links commit so many murders that even Ginger, who is not above killing “love rivals,” knows they can’t be trusted. Furthermore, The Chain does not mandate that links kidnap children; they can kidnap anyone as long as they’re not connected to law enforcement. Despite it being morally reprehensible, most choose to kidnap a child for the sake of saving their own child because they are small and trusting. As an antagonistic force, The Chain suggests that monstrosity is not separate from humanity, but dormant within humanity. Thus, human monsters and villains cannot always be easily identified and removed; one’s own darkness can emerge in a desperate enough situation.
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