. In this book masculinity and evil seem to go hand in hand. There is the character of Van, who is pretty much the same abusive man from every after school special and info-mercial we see during primetime, doing terrible things to a defenseless family. Then there is Jamie, who by my estimation is one of the meekest male characters I have encountered in a children’s book. Finally we have Earl, who is such a hollow character that I truly believe he is merely Coman’s “out” for this book and nothing more. He is the not threatening to Jamie and his family because he is not anything or anyone; he is simply the idea of a man. He is not developed as a character nor does he give any insight into the situation he encounters and therefore can be disregarded as a tertiary character either passive or emotionally absent from the world around him. Van and Jamie however, serve a much more prominent and functional purpose.Van strikes me much the same way the Warden does in Holes. Although he is presented in a slightly less fantastic light, one cannot help but see him as the embodiment of evil and destruction within Coman’s world. This not only demonstrates a stereotype of men as violent, but it also is a necessity to the book because it does not ever actually detail the violence occurring in the book other than the opening. By making Van the animal that he is, we as readers have an easier time believing he is capable of the horrors inherent within this book. He takes on almost a Neanderthal-ic feel as the book progresses and the lives of everyone involved become more complicated. I do not mean to suggest that power and masculinity always must go together, but Van most certainly is shown to us as the stereotypical dominant male from the start. Using his brawn to solve problems rather than his brain, Van is our worst nightmare of what a man is capable of becoming: a thoughtless, guiltless tornado of destruction. ...
