Preview of Carpenter's Gothic Summary:

The deteriorating social environment depicted in Carpenter's Gothic contributes significantly to one of its major themes. In such a world where nothing goes well, how can individuals find solace or meaning? The answer, in Carpenter's Gothic, is that they do not. One of the main characters, McCandless, reads his fate in a book (V. S. Naipaul's Mimic Men): "A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of...