Stillhouse Lake

“I’ve changed vehicles frequently over the past few years, from necessity, but this one…I love this one. I bought it cheap for cash on Craigslist, a quick and anonymous purchase, and it’s just the right thing for the steep, woody terrain around the lake, and the hills that stretch up toward misty blue mountains.

The symbolism isn’t lost on me.”

In addition to switching identities and houses, Gwen switches cars, and her current Jeep symbolizes the current iteration of her personality. Four years after “The Event,” Gwen is now better equipped for survival. Although she has a tendency to think that each new identity indicates a “shedding” or narrowing down of the self, the Jeep’s endurance and refusal to be discarded suggests that Gwen is finally coming into a more permanent identity.

“Gwen Proctor is the fourth identity I’ve had since leaving Wichita. Gina Royal lies dead in the past; I’m not that woman anymore. In fact, I can hardly recognize her now, that weak creature who’d submitted, pretended, smoothed over every ripple of trouble that rose.

Who’d aided and abetted, however unconsciously.”

Although Gwen was not an accomplice or accessory and genuinely didn’t know her husband was a serial killer, she still struggles with guilt, mostly because she now believes she “should have” known and could have saved some lives if she found out earlier. Everyone wants to punish Gina, and Gwen punishes herself by “killing” the old Gina and resolving to become a new person who isn’t fooled by the untrustworthy people who try to trick her.

“And they, too, have reinvented themselves—even if they’ve been forced to. I’ve let them pick their own names each time we had to move on, though I’ve had to regretfully reject some of the more creative efforts. This time they are Connor and Atlanta—Lanny, for short. We almost never slip up and use our birth names anymore. Our prisoner names, Lanny calls them…

Choosing their own names is all the control I can give my children as I drag them town to town, school to school, putting distance and time between us and the horrors of the past. It isn’t enough. Can never be enough. Children need security, stability, and I haven’t been able to give them any of that. I don’t even know if I ever can give them that.

But I’ve kept them safe from the wolves, at least, the most basic and important job of a parent, to keep her offspring from being eaten by predators.”

Pseudonyms represent the difference between who people are and who they seem to be; this issue is even more complicated for children, who are still developing their personalities and seem to change often. Gwen realizes that the extra, forced identity changes are harming the children’s senses of self and stability. She’s had to prioritize their physical safety over their emotional well-being. The novel suggests that emotional well-being may seem like a “luxury” when physical safety is immediately at stake, but in the long term, emotional stability is just as important.

“I’d made a point of meeting our closest neighbors the first week we moved in, because it seemed like a good precaution to assess them early for threats, or as possible resources in an emergency. I don’t count the Johansens as either. They are just…there. Most people just take up space anyway. The whisper comes and goes in my head, and it frightens me, because I hate remembering Melvin Royal’s voice. That was nothing he’d ever said at home, ever said to me, but I’d seen the video of him saying it at the trial. He’d said it utterly casually about the women he’d torn apart.

Mel infects me like a virus, and I have an unhealthy surety deep down that I’ll never get completely well again.”

Gwen’s assessment that the Johansens are “just there” taking up space is ironic because it foreshadows a scene later in the novel when they block her road and driveway, not allowing her to get to her house, while other people pursue her and her children. Although the Johansens aren’t aggressively evil like Mel or Graham, their behavior is still dangerous because they stand by and support evildoing. Mel’s voice intrudes into Gwen’s head sometimes, showing the lasting effects of trauma. She repeatedly compares Mel to a “virus,” disease, or other contagious things to show how his wrongdoings have “infected” others in various ways. The “monster” has “infected” copycat serial killers by convincing them to kill women, and has also infected Gwen with fear, shame, guilt, and a tendency to second-guess herself.

“On Sunday mornings, Mel had usually excused himself by saying he had things to do in the workshop.

Things to do. I have to close my eyes for a moment, because there’s a hidden monster’s joke in those words. He’s never thought of the women he’d tortured and murdered as people. He thought of them as objects. Things.”

This quotation explores the gendered nature of Mel’s serial murders, which are not unlike many real-world serial murders, where serial killers who are men choose to only target women. Mel’s misogyny, disturbingly, echoes a common type of misogyny that pervades society: viewing women as “objects.” While Mel views women as sexual objects, he takes this view even further than most people by literalizing it and removing the life from their bodies. This renders the formerly living women’s bodies into inanimate objects.

“‘Everybody gets mean on the Internet, Mom. You shouldn’t take it so seriously. Just ignore them. They’ll go away.’

That, I think, is a maddening thing to say on so many levels. As if the Internet is a fantasy world, inhabited by imaginary people. As if we’re ordinary people in the first place. And most of all, it’s such a young male thing to say, this automatic assumption of safety. Women, even girls of Lanny’s age, don’t think that way. Parents don’t. Older people don’t. It reveals a certain blind, entitled ignorance to how dangerous the world really is.”

Even though Gwen works hard to shelter her children, especially the younger one, Connor, from the reality of their father’s crimes and internet trolls, she’s sometimes furious when Connor doesn’t understand how dangerous the world is, especially for their family. This again illuminates how misogyny intertwines with crime—Gwen and Lanny, as women/girls, have to be more alert and cautious because they’re at higher risk for being targeted by people like Mel (rapists, serial killers, and the like). Connor is actually at high risk too, but he hasn’t received the same gendered conditioning that Gwen and Lanny have to teach him to be cautious. Whereas Lanny always seems to be holding a knife when the doorbell rings, Connor forgets to even turn the alarms on and off.

“He’s turned into such a quiet, introverted kid, and it scares me as much as Lanny’s outbursts. I don’t know what he’s thinking most of the time, and every once in a while I see a look, a tilt of his head, that reminds me so strongly of his father that I go cold inside, waiting to see that monster look out of his eyes…but I’ve never seen it. I don’t believe that evil is inherited.

I can’t.”

Perhaps because of his gender, Gwen seems to worry more that Connor will “inherit” Mel’s evil traits than she worries that Lanny will. This quote also reveals Gwen’s reluctance to trust people who seem quiet, introverted, or closed off. Later in the novel, she seems to learn (through analyzing characters like Connor and Javi) that being reserved doesn’t always mean people are dangerous.

“Having a strange man in my house makes me itch all over. It reminds me of evenings spent on the couch with my children. With Mel. With the thing that wore Mel as a disguise. I’d never seen through it.”

At first, this quote seems to demonstrate the depths of Gwen’s paranoia—when a police officer returns her son’s “lost” phone, she invites him inside and has a flashback to her murdering husband. However, this quote is actually ironic because Officer Graham is really a murderer who is working in cahoots with Mel, against all odds.

“There’s a reason, I think, that scary movies are so often set out in the woods; there’s a brooding, primitive power out here, a sense of being made so small and vulnerable. The people who thrive here are strong.”

Initially, Gwen makes the same false assumption that a lot of Americans make: She thinks small towns and rural areas are probably safer than big cities and urban centers, so she does a classic “white flight” by moving her family out of the medium-sized city of Wichita and to a tiny, wooded community where she bought a house for $20,000, only to find out that she was in fact lured into that community by some of its depraved residents who somehow know her ex-husband and are working with or for him.

“He’s treated me well since the beginning. It matters, in a life like mine, where I was never treated as just myself…I was always my father’s daughter, then Melvin’s wife, then Lily and Brady’s mother, and then—to many—a monster who’d escaped justice. Not a person in my own right, ever. It has taken work to get to this point where I feel entirely myself, and I cherish it. I like being Gwen Proctor because real or not, she is a full and strong person, and I can rely on her.”

Finally, Gwen begins to see “Gwen” not as another temporary identity in a series of stepping stones but rather as a fuller, more complete identity at which she has arrived. Able to create her own self, she chooses not to have her identity be defined in terms of the men in her life. She may still be a mother, but her identity is not only relational; she is also a person, not just an “object” like Mel thought she was.

“I find myself smiling in an entirely unguarded way at Sam that day, and when he smiles back, it’s just as open and free, and I have a sudden flashback to the first time Mel smiled at me. I realize in this moment that Mel’s smiles were never open, never free. For all that he played the good husband, the perfect father, it was Method acting to him. Never break character. I can see the difference in the way that Sam talks to the children, in the way he makes mistakes and corrects them, says goofy things and smart things, and is a real, natural human.

Mel was never those things…

Even when Mel had been perfect in his camouflage, he’d been shallow. His calm had felt stretched and unnatural, and so had his affection.

[…]

It makes me ill and sad to realize how little I understood what was right in front of me, right in bed with me, the entire nine years of my marriage. It was my marriage. Not ours. Because it had never been a marriage to Melvin Royal.

I’d been a tool, like the saws and hammers and knives in his workshop. I’d been his camouflage.”

Although Gwen can’t always tell when people are lying to her or withholding the truth, she’s at least developed the ability to read people’s emotions to tell whether or not they are genuine. She may not know that Sam was previously stalking her, but she can tell that he doesn’t mean her any harm now, and that he genuinely likes her and her children. Gwen is understandably reluctant to enter a romantic relationship after her last one, but she can at least discern that Sam is not Method acting.

“That name, Gina Royal, it makes me feel like I’m falling backward, into darkness and a time I’d rather never existed. Makes me feel like all the progress I’ve made has been an illusion, something Melvin could take away from me anytime he wanted.”

One way Mel pushes Gwen’s buttons is by repeatedly calling her “Gina” and refusing to honor any of her new names. Because Gwen attaches her mistakes to qualities that she associates with “Gina,” who she thinks of as “dead,” being called “Gina” makes Gwen feel powerless. The last name “Royal” makes it worse because this is Mel’s last name, making Gwen feel like he’s trying to possess her and use her as a tool once more.

“When I want to punish myself, I look at the spot where I once lived on Google Maps. I try to overlay the house on top of the park from memory. It seems to me that the large stone memorial block sits in the center of what had once been Mel’s garage and killing floor. That seems appropriate.”

Whereas houses symbolize Gwen’s family, the memorial park reminds Gwen that her old family has been “demolished” along with the house—it was actually never “real” in the first place, but now her and her children’s illusions of their husband and father have been demolished. Although the memorial attempts to honor the women by listing only their names and nothing about Mel, it still seems to Gwen to be about Mel, having been placed at the site where the women were killed instead of the sites where they lived their lives.

“It’s quiet, and I pull into my driveway with a sense of relief, which is paradoxical because this home, this sanctuary, isn’t safe anymore. It’s an illusion. It’s always been an illusion.”

Gwen thinks Mel knows where they are, which obviously means they’re not as safe at home anymore. Eventually Gwen learns to think of houses, guns, and cars as facets of safety rather than as representative of safety themselves; this line of thinking helps her feel more secure in her ability to keep her children safe even if Mel and his minions keep finding them.

“In a way, I realize, I’ve made the decision without making any decision. I’ve closed off options with this conversation. Mel knows where we are. Now Sam Cade knows everything, too. Friend or not, ally or not, I can’t trust him. I can’t trust anyone. I never could. I’ve been fooling myself for months now, but the dream is over. It might set my children back, but I need to protect their bodies first, their minds second.

[…]

Fresh start, I tell myself, and I try to believe that it isn’t just another retreat, another layer of self that I’m stripping away. I’m almost sanded to the bone now.”

Gwen continually struggles with protecting her children’s bodies versus their minds—it seems like at times, she has to prioritize their bodies and put their minds or souls on the back burner. However, she struggles because she’s also gained the insight that constant moving, secrecy, and instability are harming them emotionally, which can be just as bad.

“Nobody’s forgotten Melvin’s Little Helper, either. There’s a certain rabid, unhealthy fascination people have with male serial killers, but female accomplices are hated so much more. It’s a toxic stew of misogyny and self-righteous fury, and the simple, delicious fact that it’s okay to destroy this woman, where it’s not okay to destroy others.”

This quote illustrates another aspect of how gender complicates crime and justice—Gwen’s not even an accomplice, but people love to hate her because she’s a woman who supposedly got away with crimes. She’s defined by who she used to be married to, even though she’s not even married to him anymore and didn’t know who he truly was at the time. She becomes objectified in a new way, as the object of other people’s revenge fantasies where they think that Gwen deserves to be tortured in the same way that Mel tortured other women.

“Sam Cade has been stalking me. I have no question about it now; he moved in after I had, into that cabin, though he made a point of not encountering me until much later on. He made it seem natural. He worked his way in the door, into my life, into the lives of my children, and I hadn’t seen a thing.

I wanted to throw up. Gwen Proctor wasn’t a new person. She was just Gina Royal 2.0, ready to fall for anything sold to her by a man with a nice face and an easy smile. I’d left him with my children. Jesus. God forgive me.”

Gwen wants to believe that “Gwen,” unlike Gina, is no longer naive and is impervious to deception. When people still fool her, she gives herself a hard time, but in reality, nobody is impervious to deception, and Gwen encounters an unusual number of people who want to deceive her, due to her unique situation. Gwen is still a lot more careful and less trusting than Gina was.

“I realize that I need to get a haircut and renew my hair color; a few gray hairs are starting to make an unwelcome appearance. Funny. I always thought I’d die before I got old. That’s a whisper from the old Gina, who’d seen the day of The Event as the end of her entire life. I hate the old Gina who’d somehow naively believed in the power of true love and the smug certainty that she was a good woman, and her husband was a good man, and that it was something she deserved without putting out any effort at all.

I hate her even more now that I realize I’m still, even after all this, very much like her.”

Gender plays into all of Gwen’s experiences, not just her experience of crime—she really wanted to get married and have children, but did not have a lot of “suitors,” so she was eager when Mel asked her and probably more likely to miss red flags or signs of Method acting. Gwen starts to believe that it was wrong for her to believe that having a loving husband and family was a real possibility. This is again blaming herself too much because a loving family is still not even out of reach, and wanting to have one shouldn’t be something she gets punished for. However, she’s learned to be less “naive” even if she still beats herself up about things she didn’t notice in the past. It’s highly unlikely that she would ever let any future partner have a secret space. Presumably by “effort” she means that she needs to really get to know someone before trusting them in her home and with her children again.

“Because you need it, and Easy asked. But also…I know what it’s like to be judged for something you never got to control.”

Gwen asks Kezia why she’s trying to help her, because she’s not used to receiving genuine help, even from law enforcement, beyond what their jobs require them to do. Kezia’s response indicates a degree of empathy that Gwen is not used to at all—for once, someone views her as a person in her own right, rather than focusing on her relational identity in terms of Mel. Gwen is used to being objectified by Mel in one way, and by everyone else in a different way, and is taken aback when Kezia wants to humanize her.

“I don’t want to leave the house, though I don’t want to be here, either…It no longer feels like our safe space, our haven. It feels spoiled, cracked open like that house back in Wichita to reveal something ugly at its center. Not Mel’s evil this time. The house is no longer a home because of the cold absence…the absence of the one thing that makes any kind of home for me.”

Even worse than shattering the illusion that Mel was a good father is having her own children get abducted from her house. She was previously disturbed because of what was in her house without her knowledge (Mel and women he was killing). Now she’s disturbed because of what’s missing from the house.

“That’s what it’s like, being the ex-wife of Melvin Royal. I’m not a person. I’m just a target.”

Again, Gwen reflects on how people continuously objectify her and strip her of her humanity. Her identity is defined relationally, like a lot of women. Nobody cares about anything besides that she used to be married to someone who is a serial killer.

“I run.

Because this time, I really will feel the monster’s breath against my neck.”

Gwen normally believes the “monster” is Mel and that he has the power to infect other people with his evil. Once she realizes Graham has been infected, she now views Graham as a “monster” in his own right. This sort of monster amplifies the terror because it is not just one entity that can be stopped in its tracks; it has spread to influence an unknown number of people, many of whom are skilled at hiding in plain sight.

“Lancel Graham is lying in wait. He’s taken a classic ambush predator approach. Watching him, I remember the calm, offhand way that Melvin talked about his process in an interview a few years back: he’d crouch in just that spot by a car and wait for the woman to approach, then attack like a praying mantis in an overwhelming rush. It almost always worked.

Graham is a real fanboy. He knows my ex-husband’s habits, his moves, his strategies.

But he doesn’t know me. I survived Melvin.”

Gwen starts to embrace the idea that the only one who doesn’t run from monsters is a monster-slayer. She has to become a monster-slayer in order to physically and emotionally protect her children from Mel and the web of destruction that he’s created. Having already survived one monster, she reasons that she can survive this one too.