Later

“In the other hand I clutched my turkey, the ones we made in first grade the week before Thanksgiving. I was so proud of mine I was practically shitting nickels. What you did, see, was put your hand on a piece of construction paper and then trace around it with a crayon. That made the tail and body. When it came to the head, you were on your own.”

Stephen King’s characters often voice comments or thoughts that don’t actively contribute to the plot. However, these details provide set dressing, giving the illusion of a fully-developed world. The description of Jamie’s class drawing turkeys also provides nostalgia for some readers. Colorful, profane phrases like “shitting nickels” are to be expected of the hard-boiled detective genre.

“‘People not believing is a good thing. But someday somebody might. And that might get the wrong kind of talk going, or put you in actual danger.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s an old saying that dead men tell no tales, Jamie. But they talk to you, can’t they? Dead men and women. You say they have to answer questions, and give truthful answers… People die with secrets, Jamie, and there are always people who want to know those secrets.’”

This quote foreshadows Tia using Jamie to communicate with deceased author Regis Thomas—albeit for the sake of their survival. She also betrays Jamie’s trust by revealing his ability to girlfriend Liz, despite swearing Jamie himself to secrecy.

“I’ve been juggling bills for two years now and never dropped a single one. Sometimes I had to let the little ones go to pay the big ones, sometimes I let the big ones go to pay a bunch of little ones, but the lights stayed on and we never missed a meal. Right?”

This quote is another example of young Jamie learning about lies and gradual truths. Tia’s never failed to pay a bill, but her system of rotating payments isn’t an honest reflection of her claim that all is well. Her actions stem from desperation, but there is a hint of self-justification in her claim.

“‘You are [sulking], though, and if you tell Tia I brought you out here, we’ll probably have a fight. I don’t suppose you could tell her we went for ice cream, could you?’

We were almost back to Webster Avenue by then and I was feeling a little better. Telling myself Liz had a right to be curious, that anyone would be.

‘Maybe if you actually bought me one.’”

Liz manipulates Jamie by making him feel responsible for the fight that would (or wouldn’t) happen if he told Tia what she’s done. She also manipulates Jamie by getting him to justify her actions to himself. Regardless of whether or not she plans to use Jamie in the future in this moment, this decision speaks to her nature to control and manipulate. In this, she conforms to the role of the dangerous dame.

“I thought of asking her if it freaked her out to look up at night and see the stars and know they go on forever and ever, but didn’t bother. I just said no. You get used to marvelous things. You take them for granted. You can try not to, but you do. There’s too much wonder, that’s all. It’s everywhere.”

King isn’t prone to lyrical writing in general, and in any case, it wouldn’t be suited for the hard-boiled detective tone. This quote is the closest he gets to poetry in the novel, and makes up half of Chapter 18; this designation of space highlights its significance. For Jamie, speaking to the dead is ordinarily extraordinary, a natural part of the universe.

“[My mother] sounded hurt. Like she wanted to cry. I felt like going out and telling Liz to leave my mother alone, even if my mother had started it by finding whatever she’d found—the serious weight.”

Tia has her faults, but in this quarrel, she is the injured party. Liz, the novel’s dangerous dame, betrayed Tia by bringing a felonious quantity of drugs into the house. Yet, like many children in a dysfunctional household, Jamie sees Tia’s discovery of the problem as the problem, not Liz’s crime. This speaks to Liz’s successful manipulation of him.

“‘Hey, Champ, what the haps, bambino?’ She was leaning against her personal, legs crossed at the ankles, wearing jeans and a low-cut blouse. It was a blazer over the blouse instead of a parka, but it still had NYPD on the breast and she flapped it open in the old way to show me her shoulder holster. Only this time it wasn’t empty.

…I stopped, but I didn’t turn back to her. Like she was Medusa and one look at her snaky head would turn me to stone.”

This quote is the scene depicted on the novel’s cover. The artist, Gregory Manchess, renders the scene in a stark, dramatic style typical of hard-boiled detective mysteries of the 1920s and 1930s. The cover art places the dangerous dame front and center, looking out at the reader almost as if she were a protagonist alongside Jamie, with the actual protagonist in the background, looking at her. This choice is fairly typical of a genre aimed primarily at young men: The early marketing strategy of the genre was to lure readers with promises of sex and adventure—when in fact, Later subverts Jamie (a chivalric, non-cynical “detective”) and Liz’s (a female detective with no romantic or sexual interest in men) archetypes.

“‘I want you to take a ride with me.’

‘Not a good idea,’ I said. I was thinking of this girl named Ramona Sheinberg. She was in a couple of my classes at the beginning of the year, but then she was gone and my friend Scott Abramowitz told me her father snatched her during a custody suit and took her to someplace where there was no extradition. Scott said he hoped it was at least a place with palm trees.”

Jamie associates Liz with parental abduction, not random kidnapping. In his mind, Liz is still a surrogate mother. He recognizes that she’s dangerous, but is still susceptible to her needs. Liz has cultivated this vulnerability by coaxing him into her car while she was still dating Tia and bribing him with ice cream.

“I thought my mom’s lost friend looked older, too. Thinner. And I had to admit I also felt some admiration, because she was trying to do the right thing and save lives. She was like the hero of a movie, the lone wolf who means to solve the case on her own. Maybe she did care about the innocent people who might be vaporized in thumper’s last bomb. Probably she did. But I know now she was also concerned with saving her job.”

King gives Liz more complexity than the average dangerous dame by making her a detective. Young Jamie recognizes darkness in Liz, but mostly, he sees her as a lone-wolf hero, battered by life but determined to save the day. Adult Jamie also sees both sides to her. He believes Liz genuinely cares about saving lives, but her strongest motive is saving her job.

“‘And I have to. Sorry, Champ, but we have to know. Now pull yourself together so people don’t stare at us and think I’ve been abusing you.’

But you are, I thought. And you won’t stop until you get what you want.”

Liz is, in fact, abusing Jamie under the guise of nobility by forcing him to communicate with Kenneth Therriault’s ghost; the fact that Jamie ultimately does so out of chivalry doesn’t excuse her. This scene is yet another example of Liz’s manipulative nature, as she both justifies herself and pushes Jamie to justify her actions for her.

“‘And Jamie?…Could we not talk about this anymore. Just kind of...put it behind us?’

I thought [my mother] wasn’t just talking about Liz, or even Therriault; she was also talking about how I could see dead folks. It was what our computer teacher might have called a global request, and it was all right with me. More than all right, actually. ‘Sure.’

Right then, sitting in our brightly lit kitchen nook and eating pizza, I really thought we could put it behind us. Only I was wrong.”

This scene takes place when Jamie is 13—widely considered to be the threshold of adulthood. To mark this transition, he will undergo an initiation ritual far darker than traditional ceremonies. While questionable in a literal sense (as the ability to see the dead shouldn’t simply be ignored), Tia is metaphorically telling Jamie that he is on his own now. He has an inner life that can’t always be shared with others.

“I just put my head on her shoulder as I had when I was small and thought my hand-turkey was the greatest work of art since the Mona Lisa. Tell you what, the worst part of growing up is how it shuts you up.”

In this quote, Jamie reflects on shouldering his own burdens. One aspect of adulthood is forming an individual identity apart from anyone else. Symbolically, Jamie is confronting his own inner darkness. Moreover, he’s in the process of Becoming a Man, and Tia, a woman, can’t necessarily help him.

“He turned his head, showing me that enormous exit wound, but if he thought that was going to make me let go of the door and step back, he was wrong. Horrible as it was, I’d gotten used to it.

‘Why did you say [my mother had cancer]?’

‘Because I hate you,’ Therriault said, and bared his teeth.

‘Why are you still here? How can you be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go away.’

He said nothing.

‘Go away!’

‘I’m not going away. I’m never going away.’”

Considering Therriault as a symbol of inner darkness, this quote suggests that personal demons aren’t passive. Therriault is an active antagonist, seeking to destroy Jamie’s life and possess him, the way Liz has been gradually possessed by her demons. Moreover, one’s inner darkness never goes away; it can only be leashed.

“What if he was still haunting me—because that’s what this was, all right—when I was twenty? Or forty? What if he was there when I died at eighty-nine, waiting to welcome me into the afterlife, where he would go on haunting me even after I was dead?”

Jamie’s inner darkness is already destroying his life, and he’s beginning to recognize that he must take action. If he doesn’t, he’ll never be able to escape it, even in death. In other words, the changes that come with adulthood must be channeled and controlled.

“I understand that I’m still very young, and I’m sure that when I look back I’ll be amazed (hopefully not disgusted) by how naïve and wet behind the ears I was. Still, twenty-two is light years from thirteen. I know more now, but I believe less. Professor Burkett would never have been able to work the same magic on me now that he did back then.”

By referring to Professor Burkett’s persuasion as magic, Jamie underlines the idea of him as an archetypal wise old man. Adult Jamie look backs and comments on his younger self, suggesting that the Ritual of Chüd was more of a placebo than magic. He believes the ritual worked because his younger self was willing to believe it. Later on, adult Jamie researched the ritual and found that the professor changed it to better suit his younger self.

“Van Helsing said that a vampire couldn’t come in unless you invited him.

If it was true of vampires, it stood to reason (at least to thirteen-year-old me it did) that it was true of other supernatural beings. Like the one inside of Therriault, keeping him from disappearing after a few days like all the other dead people.”

Through the lens of fairy tales and folklore, this quote is saying that we invite our demons. Adult Jamie believes the deadlight, a literal demon, entered Therriault after he was dead—in which case, Therriault likely invited it long ago. Jamie remarks on the irony of being haunted by Therriault, simply because he did a good deed of his own free will. He stepped out of his mother’s protection to take on an adult responsibility, which is what invited the demon of adulthood.

“[Professor Burkett] looked troubled and was still thinking the whole confrontation had been in my mind. I got that but I was a little pissed just the same—I mean, he knew stuff, about the rings and Mr. Thomas’s book—but looking back on it, I understand. Belief is a high hurdle to get over and I think it’s even higher for smart people. Smart people know a lot, and maybe that makes them think they know everything.”

The more intelligent and well-educated an individual is, the more easily they can rationalize. As Jamie’s mentor of sorts, Professor Burkett actually does well to consider two contradictory ideas without outright rejecting Jamie’s story of fighting his demon.

“I walked to the Palace on Park, much older and taller than the little boy who’d come from his school one fall day holding his mother’s hand on one side and his green turkey on the other. Older, taller, and maybe even wiser, but still that same person. We change, and we don’t. I can’t explain it. It’s a mystery.”

Adult Jamie looks back from “later,” expressing one of the strangest experiences of growing up. Every person has (or should have) a stable sense of self, a feeling that remains familiar and unchanged, no matter the accumulation of one’s experiences.

“‘I asked [Professor Burkett] why his daughter never came to visit him and didn’t even come to the funeral.’ I turned off the water.

‘She’s in a mental institution, Mom. He says she’ll be there for the rest of her life. She killed her baby, and then tried to kill herself.’”

This quote foreshadows Jamie’s revelation that Tia was in a similar (or at least, an equally harrowing) position when she conceived him. Where Professor Burkett’s daughter allowed her inner demon to possess and destroy her, Tia rose above hers.

“‘You didn’t deserve any of the credit. I was the one who made him talk. And I paid a price for it. You don’t want to know.’

She cocked her head. ‘Sure I do. Tell me about the price you paid, Champ. A few bad dreams about the hole in his head? You want bad dreams, take a look at three crispy critters in a burned-out SUV sometime, one of them just a kid in a car seat. So what price did you pay?’”

This quote is another example of Liz’s self-absorption. She cuts off Jamie’s attempt to voice his pain (perpetuated by Liz herself) by describing her own experiences as a detective, as if Jamie has no right to sympathy.

“‘You’d make a hell of a detective, Jamie. with your particular skill, you’d be a star. No murderer would escape you, because you could talk to the vics.’

This idea had actually occurred to me once or twice. James Conklin, Detective of the Dead. Or maybe to the Dead. I’d never figured out which sounded better.”

Liz’s suggestion might be foreshadowing. Jamie himself considers how to best use his supernatural ability, and whether or not to let it define his future. The novel ends with no indication that adult Jamie has become a detective, an open ending befitting a Bildungsroman.

“‘The house that heroin built.’ Liz sounded vicious. ‘All the bells and whistles, plus a Mercedes and a Boxster in the garage. The stuff I lost my job for.’

I thought of saying you had a choice, which is what my mom always said to me when I screwed up, but kept my mouth shut.”

In this quote, Liz refers to her downward spiral and the hierarchy that rewards people like drug lord Donnie Marsden. But unlike Tia, who also fell for a financial scheme years ago, Liz knew what she was getting into and exactly how it worked.

“‘And believe me, a shot in the head is just what he deserved. Do you have any idea how many people he killed with his...his happy poison?’

Who helped him? I thought, and of course didn’t say.

‘How long do you think he would have lived, anyway? Two years? Five?

I’ve been in his bathroom, Jamie. He’s got a double-wide toilet seat!’ She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort of disgust.”

Liz continues to justify her actions to Jamie, including her murder of Donnie Marsden—but no matter her excuses, she displays a cold indifference to the value of human life. No matter what Donnie Marsden has done, Liz killed him and the gate guard for her own benefit, and Jamie has no reason to think she values him any more than she does anyone else.