No Exit

The series of odd statues outside the Wanashono rest station, which are first referred to as “Nightmare Children” by Ashley in Chapter 1, are a static emblem that, despite their unchanging nature—and the frequently unchanging language that is used to characterize them—mean different things to Darby at different points in the novel. In the first chapter, Darby offers a complete description of the so-called Nightmare Children:

She didn’t realize how unsettling the statues were until she was alone with them. The children were missing chunks. It was an art style she’d seen before—the sculptor uses raw hunks of bronze, fusing them in odd and counterintuitive welds that left seams and gaps—but in the darkness, her imagination rendered gore. The boy to her left, the one swinging a baseball bat that Ashley had called the little leaguer, had an exposed rib cage. Others waved spindly, mangled arms, missing patches of flesh. Like a crowd of pit-bull-mauling victims, gnawed half to the bone (14).

In addition to providing foreshadowing for the carnage that is to come, this initial characterization combines intellectual understanding (Darby knows this art form) with affective response (in the dark, they become unsettling).