What is the author's tone in the novel, Verity?

The novel’s prose supports a variety of tones, mostly ranging from a quiet sense of the mundane to a gradually increasing sense of sinister dynamics underneath that original foundation of mundaneness. The novel foreshadows these tonal dynamics in the very first scene, which is notable in its presentation of danger and everyday life. Lowen witnesses the sudden death of a random pedestrian who is hit and killed by a truck. In a dry but also somewhat sinister fashion, the narration describes the incident as “Death by routine” (1).

The rest of the novel then operates on a gradual transition from the mundane to the subtly sinister to the overtly hostile, as Lowen and the reader become increasingly aware of the disturbing dynamics that seem to underlie the situation within the Crawfords’ house.