When the Stars Go Dark

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 2, Chapter 14

Part 2, Chapters 15-29

Part 2, Chapter 30-Part 3, Chapter 44

Part 3, Chapter 45-Part 4, Chapter 60

Part 4, Chapters 61-70

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Fusing Fiction and Nonfiction

During Anna’s ongoing investigation of Cameron Curtis’s disappearance, she receives a police bulletin that contains details about a similar abduction about two hours south in the town of Petaluma. A 12-year-old girl named Polly Klaas had been abducted at knifepoint during a sleepover at a neighbor’s house. The girl was still missing, and the abductor still at large. Sensitive to the possibility that Cameron’s disappearance might be linked to this case, Anna and Will head to Petaluma to investigate. As the details of the abduction sink in, Anna begins to feel the agony and panic of the young girl, her “Friday night sleepover suddenly torn like a pink paper heart” (73). In Petaluma, Anna and Will are greeted by lead detectives. They are given access to witness testimony. They pore over the FBI profile of the abductor. Although Anna is impressed by the community’s effort to locate the missing girl—and she believes Mendocino needs to do something similar to raise awareness—in the end Anna intuits (rightly) that the two cases are not linked, that the 12-year-old’s disappearance does not fit the pattern of Cameron’s disappearance.

In the case of a missing teen, any similar events within a reasonable distance might prove a valuable connection. What is not routine, however, is that Polly Klaas is not a fictional character. Twelve-year-old Polly Klaas was abducted on 1 October 1993 from a sleepover with friends in the town of Petaluma. Her body was found two months later after a massive search and national media attention (thanks in part to celebrities who appeared on behalf of the family).

The use of a real missing child case—as well as the actual detectives, family, and community leaders—is risky. Author Paula McLain could be—and was—accused of exploiting the tragedy of the Klaas family for shock effect. It’s possible to debate the author’s choice, from a narrative standpoint, to include a real murdered child, a child who has since her murder had her name become synonymous with missing children cases. Weaving the story of Polly Klaas into a novel, however, gives the novel an immediacy that not only dignifies Polly’s death by remembering her but also gives the fictional treatments of Cameron and Shannan a chilling verisimilitude. In making room in a fictional space for a real-life kidnapped and murdered child, the novel gains a dimension of relevancy and reminds readers that the dark reality of missing children is hardly only a plot device.

The Time and the Maiden Statue

Mendocino’s Time and the Maiden statue—“the most iconic thing in the village” (18), according to Anna—bookends the novel. It is the first thing Anna notes when she arrives in town and the last thing she ponders before she returns to San Francisco.

It is a “mystery in plain sight” (18). Above the town is this large carving atop the Mendocino County Savings Bank: two figures, an elderly winged figure carrying a scythe who is braiding the hair of a girl, apparently weeping, her head bowed over an open book, at her feet an urn and an hourglass. It is surely an odd sculpture to adorn a bank. The cryptic symbolism of the carving, rendered entirely from a single massive piece of redwood, is rumored to be expressions of the secret fraternal order of the Masons, whose temple once occupied the building. Hap, who was a Mason, tells Anna the statue’s figures are a mystery, even to the Masons: “They tell a story known only to the Masons back in the 1800s,” which was “never written down, only passed on by mouth until it faded into time” (18).

Anna admits that she has long been intrigued by what the statue atop the bank symbolizes, certain there was a morbid and forbidding sense of gothic mystery to it. The statue is of a figure of an imperiled young girl unaware of the danger around her, her hair being braided by a robed figure that recalls the Grim Reaper. The girl, Anna has always assumed, is doomed. After all, the statue offers traditional symbols of death—the hourglass, suggesting the unstopped movement of time, and the urn suggesting the reality of mortality.

After Anna works through the case of Cameron Curtis and in the process immerses herself in other open cases of other missing girls, the statue suggests more to Anna on her way out of town. Now the weeping girl in the carving symbolizes all the girls whose cases she knew too well: Jenny, Shannan, Cameron, Anna’s sister Amy, and ultimately Anna herself—all innocent people of forces they could not control or see coming, threats that exposed their vulnerability and preyed on their helplessness.

In an epiphany, Anna sees that the statue can be a source of unexpected hope. Cameron, after all, had survived, and as for herself, Anna is driving boldly into the sunrise, ready now to return rather than run from her life. The statue in the end symbolizes Anna’s rejection of her “victimhood,” her refusal to inter herself in her past and her ability to forgive herself for an accident she did not cause: “[The statue] told me what love might still do to save me, if I had the courage to let it in” (360).

“I Am Much Too Alone in the World”

A writer uses an allusion, a reference to another work, to highlight a theme or to deepen the understanding of a character or a situation. When Anna visits Cameron’s school as part of her investigation, she checks the missing girl’s locker and finds amid her textbooks and her well-thumbed edition of Jane Eyre (the story of a young girl abused by her adoptive aunt before her triumph over her circumstances) a postcard on which Cameron has painstakingly transcribed “I Am Much Too Alone in the World” a lyric from a collection of poems called Book of Hours: Love Poems to Gods (1905) by Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).

The poem speaks of a lover whose hungry and needful heart is burdened by alienation, unable to find comfort in a terrifying world. The poem speaks of the fear of being who you are in such a world, preferring to be someone you are not to save the heart from fragmenting. With regret, the poet implies that such love will never be, that the speaker will stay forever “folded,” or concealed, pretending to be something unreal in an effort to protect their vulnerable self.

The poem speaks to Cameron’s and Anna’s loneliness, as they experienced the foster care system, how in moving home to home, changing family to family, their own identities seem irrelevant, even unnecessary. The tragedy of surviving by being someone you’re not recalls Cameron’s mindset as she posed for modeling pictures in “sexy” costumes that were not her. The reality of foster care compels those children caught up in its system to question their identity, to hide from the world, and to pretend in order to survive.

Interestingly, Cameron does not transcribe the poem’s closing stanza. Deliberately eliminating it speaks to Cameron’s own desperation. In the closing eight lines, Rilke offers hope that the wounded and lonely heart will find its way like a ship tossed but not sunk by a storm. The poem closes with an affirmation that at such a moment the speaker-poet will finally understand the reach and power of the heart. Cameron, just finding out about her father’s infidelity and in turn the medical evidence that she was sexually abused, cannot affirm Rilke’s hope that wounded hearts survive. Instead, she pursues Caleb’s toxic attention by pretending to be what she is not, a charade that nearly gets her killed.