No Exit

The series of odd statues outside the Wanashono rest station, which are first referred to as “Nightmare Children” by Ashley in Chapter 1, are a static emblem that, despite their unchanging nature—and the frequently unchanging language that is used to characterize them—mean different things to Darby at different points in the novel. In the first chapter, Darby offers a complete description of the so-called Nightmare Children:

She didn’t realize how unsettling the statues were until she was alone with them. The children were missing chunks. It was an art style she’d seen before—the sculptor uses raw hunks of bronze, fusing them in odd and counterintuitive welds that left seams and gaps—but in the darkness, her imagination rendered gore. The boy to her left, the one swinging a baseball bat that Ashley had called the little leaguer, had an exposed rib cage. Others waved spindly, mangled arms, missing patches of flesh. Like a crowd of pit-bull-mauling victims, gnawed half to the bone (14).

In addition to providing foreshadowing for the carnage that is to come, this initial characterization combines intellectual understanding (Darby knows this art form) with affective response (in the dark, they become unsettling). This contrast highlights one of the central conflicts in the novel as Darby continually works to outwit and outrun Ashley and Lars: She must rely both on what her mind tells her and on what instinct tells her, though these demands are frequently in conflict with one another.

The language of this first description is echoed in subsequent encounters with the statues, even as Darby experiences them in different ways. When she is running away from the rest stop after narrowly escaping Ashley’s attempt to suffocate her with a plastic bag, the Nightmare Children become a mere landmark: “She passed the crowd of half-buried Nightmare Children to her left. Chewed bronze forms in the darkness, pit-bull-mauling victims frozen in playtime” (93). She quickly bypasses them; they merely mark her position in the blinding snow, a status that is repeated when Darby flees Ashley in the snow. Seeing the Nightmare Children then confirms that she is “within eyeshot of the rest area” and therefore safety (102).

Later, the Nightmare Children represent Ashley’s duplicity, even in cases where lying ultimately didn’t change anything: “To hell with Ashley’s Nightmare Children. In hindsight, she understood that had almost certainly been another of his lies. Just one more wicked ruse, to make her waste her battery” (132). Though Darby does waste battery out by the statues, she still gets all the use she needs of her phone before Ashley breaks it. Finally, as rescue appears in the distance, the battered but still standing emblems of the Nightmare Children provide an analogue for Darby and Jay, who have survived, despite the odds: “They’d reached the Nightmare Children—those dozen or so half-gnawed kids frozen in apocalyptic playtime, buried to their waists in snow—when Jay stopped, pointing downhill, stabbing with her finger: ‘Look. Look, look!’ […] Headlights” (166). Darby and Jay come to resemble the Nightmare Children, symbolizing their journey through the harrowing night in their grotesque bronze forms.