Nightwatching

“The old house let the wind hiss through and crack its ribs. The sounds of it bracing against the storm, its staggered breathing, were familiar.”

This passage establishes the importance of the old house as a key setting, and the descriptions personify it, rendering it a character as well as a place. Old homes make many sounds, such as creaking floors, squeaking doors, and outside air leaking through drafty joints. The use of personification in the passage makes the house come alive, as if it is bracing itself against the physical storm raging outside and the metaphorical one that is about to begin inside its walls.

“She saw fingers wrap the banister like white spider legs.”

The intruder is depicted as menacing from the very first moment, and the motif of animals is invoked from the first moment that the mother sees him. Comparing his fingers to spider legs increases his sinister appearance and his creeping qualities. Spiders trap their victims before killing them, and by entering the home, the intruder has trapped the mother and children with no hope of escape.

“The surging panic in her frozen body turned her into a live wire stripped bare but unable to release a charge.”

Humans are hard-wired to respond to fear in order to ensure self-preservation, and the author actively invokes visceral descriptions of the mother’s trauma responses in order to heighten the