Description: 1. Who killed Dustin's parents, aunt, and uncle? What is the most plausible answer? What is the most emotionally true answer? 2. What is the purpose of the typographic eccentricities in the book--the gaps, the columns, the missing punctuation, etc.' How did you go about maneuvering through these elements? 3. Which of the characters has the greatest self-awareness? Who is most trustworthy? Which of these traits makes a character more likeable? 4. At one point, Jill tells Dustin, "Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance." To what extent does social class play a role in this novel? Do you think what Jill says is true? 5. The term "motivation" is often used as a way to frame characters in a novel. What motivates these characters? What does the concept of "motive" mean? 6. Dennis assumes that Dustin has committed suicide at the end. Do you think so? Is Dustin, as Wave tells Aaron, "the bad guy" of the story? 7. The book's epigraph is from the French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine: "We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it." Could the characters in this book have avoided their destinies, or were they doomed from the outset? If you compare Dustin, Rusty, and Aaron, who had the best chance to avoid his fate? Could any of them have escaped? 8. One of the mantras Dustin tells his patients is: "Sometimes a dead bird is just a dead bird." What does he mean? When is a dead bird not just a dead bird? 9. When Rusty is in prison, a psychologist tells him that he has a virus. "And the virus will demand that you pass it on to someone else. You don't even have that much of a choice." Do you think this is true? If so, what kind of "virus" is it, exactly? 10. Why do you think Aqil does what he does? Is he a predator? An opportunist? Does he target Dustin from the start, or is it an idea that comes to him gradually as he gets to know Dustin? If Aqil is evil, what is the nature of his evil?

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