Although The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp is a comic fantasy centered in Blossom Culp's gift of second sight, magic and the supernatural are not so much themes as they are a means of developing themes. The central topics of Peck's novel involve alienation, bigotry, hypocrisy, friendship, conformity, and individuality. These are essentially embodied in the wide range of colorful characters observed by Blossom both in the Bluff City of her own time and the Bluff City of the future.

Blossom's acute powers of observation, her position as a social outcast, and her unsparingly frank narrative voice allow for the often comic exposure of the failings of her peers and superiors. Snobbery is embodied in the mean-spirited Letty Shambaugh whose exclusive club of back-biting, stuck-up, and cowardly girls is hypocritically called The Sunny Thoughts and Busy Fingers Sisterhood. Hypocrisy is also embodied in the...