“They’re all dead now.”

The Prologue, functioning like the overture to an opera, appropriate given the novel’s use of opera music, introduces the principal characters in the Piper family as well as their house and their town.

“Did all women get this ugly?”

James begins the novel seemingly as a romantic hero, sweeping the young Materia off her feet and freeing her from an arranged marriage. However, the reality is much more disturbing: Materia, who is only 12, is a victim of James’s predatory hunger for prepubescent girls. Once Materia has delivered Kathleen, James rejects her for no longer fitting his pedophilic desires.

“Materia took Kathleen by the hair as usual and plunged her head backward for the first rinsing, she kept it under enough to say into the submerged green eyes, ‘Do you renounce Satan?’”

The novel uses the Catholic ritual of water baptism as a threshold event that consecrates the fallible and corrupt body to the energy and grace of the Catholic God. James, an indifferent Protestant, forbids Materia from baptizing their daughter Kathleen. Here Materia goes through the sacrament in the bathtub in the first of what will be several traumatic baptisms.