1. What do you make of the title of the book? Is it unnecessarily gloomy or pessimistic?

2. This novel was published in the late 1950s, a time we now look back on with some nostalgia as a simpler or more settled period of American history. If this is so, how do you account for the subject matter of the book?

3. Like many of the other Archer tales, The Doomsters takes place in a seemingly quiet, normal small town.

But underneath the quietude lies a seething corruption. How does this plot undermine our typical notions of small-town America?

4. The novel opens with Archer dreaming of a hairless ape who lived in a cage. In what ways does this "dream" quality infuse the whole novel?

5. Macdonald underwent psychotherapy immediately before publishing this novel. Can you detect elements of his recent experience in the novel?

6. By the late 1950s Macdonald...