Goodies General Notes and Table of Contents (read this first!)


Chapter Twenty-Six

One of the difficult things about this section is that it’s one of the biggest infodumps in the book. We find out who Edward’s father really is, and we find out what organization he belongs to, and the anagram puzzle is finally solved—and yet, after all that, Eric and Rebekah’s direction isn’t any clearer. They realize that Edward is bad news and that they can’t rely on him, and they have an inkling that they ought to run away, but they’re still kind of in limbo. In fact, this chapter and the next mostly exist because Rebekah was expecting something more explicit, some clue that explained everything and told them what to do.

Of course, the question that Rebekah is about to ask is the one she asks in Chapter 32.

Here’s a funny story about why it’s good to have editors. This trivia actually belongs back in Chapter 22, but I’m putting it here. When they first go down the ladder into the catacombs, I originally wrote it so that Eric went down first, and then, from the bottom, shined the flashlight up so that Rebekah could climb down. This was all fine and dandy, and the book went through a million test readers and copy editors and no one had a problem with it. Finally, right before it went to typeset, my editor realized that Rebekah was wearing a knee-length skirt—and that the book describes Eric watching her closely as she climbed down the ladder to him. So . . . yeah. That got fixed.

Have you noticed that it rains a lot in this book, and usually at climactic points? Is the rain symbolic? If so, what does it represent? Write a 500 word essay entitled: “No, and Nothing.”

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