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Summary
Sections 56-60
56
About a year after Dori’s father passed away, Demon comes home to find Dori has overdosed, her dog lying dead beside her. It’s unclear whether her death was an accident or a deliberate act to end both her life and the dog’s. Demon feels a mix of grief and futility, believing he did everything he could to help her, but it didn’t make a difference.
Dori’s domineering Aunt Fred returns and takes over, making all the funeral arrangements with no input from Demon. Only a few people attend the funeral, and Demon feels hardhearted toward them, knowing none of them truly cared about Dori while she was alive. Angus comes to support him, and when he asks about Coach, she updates him on the fallout. The family is selling their house to pay back the stolen money, and Coach is going to rehab. Although he may get suspended from his coaching job, it won’t happen until after the current football season. Angus plans to help him for a year but remains determined to go to a four-year college afterward. When Demon asks if it’s harsh to leave Coach, Angus explains she’s unwilling to sacrifice her future for someone who refuses to stop drinking. She offers to adjust her plans for Demon instead, but he declines, not wanting to drag her down with him.
After the funeral, Aunt Fred arranges for most of Dori and Demon’s belongings to be trashed. However, she lets him keep the car, mistakenly assuming it’s his. Homeless and alone, Demon starts living in the car. It isn’t until later that he remembers Dori’s dog’s corpse. Though he hated the dog for its constant jealousy and aggression toward him, he knows how much the dog loved Dori, so he gives the dog a proper burial.
57
Demon spends a few days living in his car until Maggot finds him and tells him that Mrs. Peggot wants him to move in. Reluctantly, Demon agrees, thinking he can help around the house, but his addiction has consumed him to the point where he’s barely functional. Before Dori’s death, he had been like many addicts, using just enough to avoid withdrawal. Now, his aim is to "reach zero"—to feel absolutely nothing.
The only thing keeping him tethered to reality is his work on Red Neck. He refuses to let Tommy down, even in his worst state. Tommy now writes the stories and sketches out rough versions featuring skeletons as placeholders, which Demon finishes later. Demon grows attached to Tommy’s skeletal figures, seeing them as a haunting representation of people as ghosts, and asks to keep them.
Demon’s rock bottom comes in June, when he and Maggot spend time at the Woodway crack house and run into Rose Dartell. Rose offers to take Demon to Fast Forward, revealing where he’s living. Demon doesn’t want to see him—he’s still furious about what Fast Forward did to Emmy—but agrees to go anyway.
As they’re driving, they spot Hammer Kelly on the side of the road dealing with a flat tire. Demon stops to help, quickly realizing Hammer is drunk. Despite Demon’s earlier warnings to Maggot not to introduce Hammer to anything stronger while he’s still inexperienced with alcohol, Demon sees Maggot giving Hammer meth in the car. The rain intensifies, flooding the street and forcing them to abandon the truck, although Hammer takes his firearm.
Part of Demon tells himself to turn back, recognizing that nothing good can come from bringing Hammer to Fast Forward. But since Dori’s death, he feels he has no home to return to. At Fast Forward’s house, they’re greeted by a pretty girl who informs them that Fast Forward has gone to Devil’s Bathtub. Hammer freezes at the mention of Fast Forward and announces that they’re leaving, and his life as the polite, tenderhearted boy that everyone loved is over.
58
They arrive at Devil’s Bathtub, Hammer resolute in his determination to avenge Emmy. As they approach, Demon begins to suspect that the entire situation is a set-up. It feels too coincidental—Rose appearing out of nowhere to lure him to the very place he fears most.
At the waterfall, they find Fast Forward naked on a ledge. Hammer starts screaming at him, and Fast Forward dismissively tells them that Emmy isn’t worth their trouble, which only enrages Hammer further. He starts climbing up to confront him.
Big Bear, Fast Forward’s best friend, sees the gun and suddenly yells that Hammer is going to shoot Fast Forward. The threat startles Fast Forward, who slips from the ledge and plummets down the waterfall. Demon watches in horror as Fast Forward’s body tumbles through the air. The fall is long, and it’s clear by the time he hits the water that he’s dead.
Hammer panics, insisting that he wasn’t going to shoot and that they have to save Fast Forward. Demon tries to stop him, but Hammer jumps into the water. The strong currents quickly overwhelm him, and Demon can do nothing but watch as Hammer loses control and drowns. In the aftermath, Demon drags both bodies to shore and disposes of the gun by kicking it into the water.
Reflecting on the tragedy, Demon acknowledges that some things are simply not survivable. The events at Devil’s Bathtub irrevocably change them all. Hammer’s desperate act seals his fate, and the burden of guilt will weigh heavily on Big Bear for the rest of his life. Demon hints that the trauma of this moment is only the beginning of what’s to come for Maggot, who will be haunted in ways they couldn’t yet foresee.
59
Demon ends up in the hospital suffering from exposure. He carefully answers the doctors' pain assessment questions to ensure he’ll be prescribed Oxy. The next morning, Rose visits him and accuses him of being a murderer, blaming him for giving Hammer drugs. She tells him that she’s lost everything and wants everyone else to feel the same. She admits that she lured him to Devil’s Bathtub for Fast Forward but claims she doesn’t know why. Demon counters that Fast Forward was cruel to everyone, including her. Rose breaks down, claiming that Fast Forward giving her the scar ensured she would belong to him forever.
Demon returns to the Peggots and tells them a sanitized version of events: Hammer died a hero, trying to save Fast Forward. Life in the Peggot household is muted and surreal. Mrs. Peggot keeps the TV on constantly to drown out the silence left by Mr. Peggot’s death. Demon watches, bewildered, as thousands of people publicly mourn Ronald Reagan, a man who lived to an old age.
Rose follows through on her threats, and Maggot is charged in connection with Hammer’s death. June finds him a lawyer, and because he’s young, he’ll be tried as a minor. His court date is scheduled for the same month Mariah is set to be released from prison. June also arranges for Demon to enter a suboxone clinic to detox and a halfway house afterward. He’s reluctant, unable to imagine spending a year in Knoxville, and lies, saying he’ll think about it.
During this time, Demon comes to a profound realization: June’s love is the purest kind he’s ever known—not just maternal, but unconditional and steadfast. June insists that Maggot will go to rehab when he’s ready and hopes that the charges will serve as a wake-up call. Demon reflects that they all lost their minds, and June responds that boys don’t lose their minds for no reason—it happens because they’ve had too much taken away from them.
60
Demon packs his belongings and leaves the Peggots’ house, feeling uncomfortable staying there and being in their debt. With nowhere else to go, he drives aimlessly until he arrives at the park where Ms. Barks once took him. Hoping to escape the weight of his memories, he sets off on a hiking trail, walking without a clear destination.
As hunger and thirst set in, he begins to hallucinate. He imagines Mr. Peg, the father figure he lost, and feels an intense longing to talk to Angus, the one person who has been a constant in his life. Though she’s preparing to leave for a four-year college in Nashville at the end of the summer, Demon finds it within himself to feel genuinely happy for her. By nightfall, exhausted and overwhelmed, Demon makes a quiet resolution: if he survives until morning, he’ll call June and tell her he’s ready to go to the suboxone clinic and start the long process of getting clean.
Analysis
Dori’s death parallels Demon’s mother’s, underscoring the cyclical nature of trauma and loss in Demon’s life. Both women succumb to addiction, and in both cases, Demon is the one to find their bodies. In both cases, he is left to interpret the ambiguous nature of their final moments. His mother’s overdose on his birthday lingers in his mind as potentially intentional, and Dori’s death carries a similarly haunting ambiguity—whether it was an accident or a deliberate act to end her suffering alongside her dog’s.
Both funerals are deeply wrong in ways that compound Demon’s grief. His mother’s funeral is dictated by the superficial preferences of others, held in a church she despised and framed in a way that distances her from her true identity. Similarly, Dori’s domineering Aunt Fred takes over her funeral arrangements, erasing any sense of Dori’s individuality or the depth of her struggles. In both instances, the ceremonies become performances for people who barely cared about the deceased while they were alive. Demon’s anger at the attendees reflects his understanding of how little society values those who are consumed by addiction until it’s too late. In both cases, Demon feels isolated in his grief. The lack of meaningful communal mourning highlights the stigma that shrouds addiction-related deaths, reducing those who die to stereotypes rather than fully human beings.
The deaths of Hammer and Fast Forward at Devil’s Bathtub are laden with fatalism, echoing the generational cycles of tragedy that have shaped Demon’s life. The scene, charged with the inevitability of disaster, parallels the death of Demon’s father, who also lost his life at Devil’s Bathtub in an act of desperate sacrifice. Just as his father died trying to save Demon’s mother, Hammer’s and Fast Forward’s deaths arise from a collision of impulsive decisions, unresolved tensions, and the unforgiving forces of nature. Interestingly, the concept of Chekhov’s gun—where an introduced element must pay off later—is turned on its head in this sequence. The gun that Hammer brings to the confrontation is ultimately irrelevant to the deaths that occur.
These deaths also force Demon to confront the legacy of his father’s death and the profound misery it caused his mother. Her grief, guilt, and eventual descent into addiction were foundational to Demon’s understanding of loss, shaping his own trajectory in ways he couldn’t escape. Now, witnessing Hammer and Fast Forward’s deaths, Demon sees how these patterns of tragedy perpetuate themselves, compounding misery across generations. Just as his mother was left to carry the emotional weight of his father’s death, Demon and those around him—Maggot, Big Bear, and others—must now live with the consequences of what occurred at Devil’s Bathtub. For Demon, these events crystallize his fear that he is trapped by the circumstances of his birth, unable to escape the forces that have claimed so many before him.
The cruelest irony lies in the fact that Demon, who has always felt a strange comfort in water because drowning is "the one bad thing" that can’t happen to him, witnesses others succumb to its power. His father died in an act of self-sacrifice at Devil’s Bathtub, Hammer drowned in its unrelenting currents, and Fast Forward’s fall from the ledge ended with the water claiming his life. For Demon, water becomes a harbinger of loss—a force that spares him physically but leaves him emotionally wrecked, haunted by its role in the tragedies that have defined his journey. The very element that brought him life seems to take it from those he loves, reinforcing the fatalism that hangs over his story. The waterfall, as a literal and symbolic force, becomes a harbinger of the fatalism that pervades the story, leaving Demon to wonder if he, too, is doomed to follow the same tragic path
