Showing her ability to find pity and terror in the ludicrous and the ludicrous in the terror, Jackson creates a fantasy of the end of the world [in The Sundial], which parodies the apocalyptic imagination while portraying it. (pp. 74-5)

The novel is concerned with the nature of belief, with the way desperate people grasp a belief and make it their truth, with how belief and madness combine and lead to desperate behavior, with how belief is a form of madness itself, making people into grotesques. (p. 75)

Mrs. Halloran's hubris blinds her to her own limitations, causing her to miscalculate, to gamble for the highest stakes in a situation she could not control…. Mrs. Halloran sought control over the future the way she tried to control the present and failed at both. (p. 78)

Mrs. Halloran sees quite clearly the ridiculousness of the True Believers but cannot see that...