The End of Her World

The end of the world in On Black Wings can be seen as a metaphor. You could totally flip the story around in your head and say her 34-year old self never existed, the 17-year old heroine is the only real Jessica White, and that end of the world scenario signifies the end of her youth and her progression into adulthood.

All the pieces are there, as are all of the fears. A husband that holds a dark secret, fears she never will truly love her children, losing her children to war, losing her world when her marriage breaks apart, never living up to the expectations of her faith, and dealing with eventual sickness and death for herself.

In short, her older self may just be a fear of hers, and her projections of her thoughts on growing up.

There is a set of concepts and metaphors written into the entire narrative arc in negative space, and I just love this. The things she sees, goes through, and worries about are real, actual concerns - a loss of innocence, a lack of control of events in the world around her, and the helplessness of her basic condition. Even the lack of her ability to control where she is at a single moment in time can be read as a fear she will lose her livelihood, her job, and her world will come crashing apart.

There is very much so a negative space arc in this book you can read the opposite way.

There are people she meets, ones she think she can trust, authority figures, and others who mirror the paranormal figures and the real ones. What happens to her by the paranormal ones can be seen in the actions of the real characters towards her, so you could read her fears are being transferred from the real world to the metaphysical. In this book, the paranormal world is very much real, and there is a scene that takes this to a harrowing apex where they collide.

Yet the world-ending plot is terrifying, and she has to deal with this directly in many scenes. That over-arcing fear of something so innocent becoming so mindlessly and mercilessly destructive is something directly ripped from a nightmare. It is so horrific and almost terrifyingly paranormal it couldn't be real, but it is, and it is merciless and unnerving.

Still, we see the fantastic mirror of reality here, and in an arc of negative space where you could read things differently, it makes for a deeper read. The story still works along a typical paranormal horror level, and there is a fair bit of action-horror-adventure by the end, but those deeper meanings keep coming back and haunting both what she sees and what happens to her in eerily similar ways.

The end of the world in many ways can be read as a metaphor for the end of her youth, and the mistakes she felt she made when she left home. She keeps coming back to those and dealing with them, and they define who she is as a person. In some ways she can't escape them, and in other ways she learns to accept them.