The Writing Retreat

Content Warning: This section explores violent, abusive, sexual, and occult subject matter.

Alex is the novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator. A 30-year-old aspiring writer, Alex hungers for recognition and connection: She has always felt like an outsider and she has been especially lonely since the breakdown of her friendship with Wren. Alex is not, however, always a reliable narrator. For example, her feelings for Wren alternate between anger—the first line of the novel is an expression of dismissal beginning with an expletive—sadness, nostalgia, and confusion. It also becomes clear that Alex’s description of their friendship’s demise does not conform exactly to the objective truth. Alex’s experiences at the writing retreat are likewise colored by strong emotion: She fears that Wren might expose her, continues to idealize Roza despite Roza’s destructive behavior, and exaggerates Blackbriar’s Gothic elements. These elements of instability help Bartz create a complex coming-of-age story with an unreliable narrator. By its end, Alex achieves emotional stability, a concrete sense of self, and hard-won professional success.

At first, though, Alex agonizes over her inability to fit in. She is dogged by feelings of isolation from youth. Raised by a single mother, Alex moves often during her school years and takes refuge in books—Roza’s books in particular. It is unsurprising, then, that Alex decides to try her hand at writing. When she meets the other women at the retreat (Wren excepted), she sighs in relief, “It just felt so nice to belong” (45). This feeling is short-lived, however, as Roza strives to pit the women against one another: first by making the writing retreat a competition, later by stoking suspicions between the writers. When Alex realizes that writer’s block continues to stymie her ideas, her feelings of belonging quickly dissipate. Compared to the other writers, she confesses, “I was the outlier, the little trail of the comet, flying off into oblivion” (78). When she flounders during the ghost-story competition and returns from the basement, she imagines the others are looking at her “displeased, like I was a raccoon who’d wandered into the house” (121). Alex’s self-confidence is contingent on how others see her—or, more precisely, on how she thinks others see her.

Fittingly, Roza gifts Alex the necklace with the spider pendant. On the one hand, the spider symbolizes fear and elicits a recoil response from most humans. When Alex discusses her mother, who is now remarried with a new family, she recalls that her mother views her “like a gnarly spider that had appeared on the wall” (133). She feels neglected and rejected by her own mother and, eventually, by Wren. On the other hand, the spider is culturally revered for its ability to weave extraordinary webs. Alex is strong and resilient like the spider, although her “web” is spun from stories. Roza describes the spider as a representation of “[r]esourcefulness” (63).

Alex becomes remarkably resourceful during the course of events. She comes to terms with her feelings for Wren, as well as her feelings about sexuality in general. She accepts that she harbors sexual attraction for women. She acknowledges that she might have been unable “to imagine sex with women simply because [she] hadn’t experienced it before” (127). After her experiences with Wren and “Lamia”/Taylor at the retreat, Alex comes to embrace her desire for sexual intimacy with women. In a linked development, she also becomes more confident in herself and her writing. She exhibits bravery and loyalty during the final tragic events of the retreat. She knows that the work she has done there is good, and the accuracy of this self-assessment is confirmed by its later publication. She grabs hold of her personal power as a survivor and learns to trust herself. Alex reclaims herself: “I wasn’t some broken thing. Despite the lingering aftereffects, I was stronger than they’d ever know” (301). As she readjusts to her new life and revels in her book’s success, she thrills at the possibilities for her romantic future, “clicking Everyone when it asked what gender I was looking for” (307). Her embrace of her fluid sexual preferences coincides with finding her voice as a writer. Alex’s external resourcefulness mirrors the fullness of her inner emotional and imaginative resources.