Literature / Lights Are Off But Everyone's Home

Creator Breakdown with a side of X-Rated BurtonEsque Nightmare Fuel!

"Life is Life, and She does not bend
To the Wishes and Wills of Gods or Men."

— Trent Staley's Mantra.

Lights Are Off, But Everyone's Home: Or, All the Things I'm going to Hell for, is a 2021 Young Adult Black Comedy Graphic Novel by Kent J. Starrett about a sixteen-year-old boy, Trent Staley, whose parents were killed in a car accident three years before the story begins in 2008. The book follows a year in Trent's life, where he lives with his brain-damaged older brother and expresses all his pain and rage through the book's twenty-nine full-color illustrations and his own novel, Midnight City, which we see chapters of spread throughout the book.

The primary story arc concerns Staley's relationship with Diane Bourdon, a twenty-three-year-old Goth college girl who seems at first to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. This relationship soon devolves into a dysfunctional, codependent nightmare that threatens to consume the both of them.

Rounding out the cast are Maria, a Perky Goth who takes an interest in Trent's art and writing, her guitarist boyfriend, a booksmart Lovable Jock named Connor, a Black and Nerdy aspiring journalist named Roger who relentlessly pursues Trent for the school newspaper, and the Hippie Teacher Miss Yorke who encourages his creative output. As the plot develops, Trent's novel and short stories begin to reflect his tumultuous reality, and we watch his Creator Breakdown through the lens of his Surreal Horror and Photoshopped Artwork.

First published as a Web Original called Night Life in 2016, Lights Are Off, but Everyone's Home is a graphic, uncompromising Period Piece about abusive relationships (of all kinds) in the late 2000's.

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This work contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Staley's Older brother and Legal Guardian, Vance, not only starves Trent and refuses to buy him food (Trent works at a Borders and pays for his diet of beef jerky, ramen noodles, and loaves of bread that way), but is also delusionally convinced that their parents hated him and favored Trent; of which there is absolutely no evidence and which Trent chalks up to Vance's brain damage.
• Adults Are Useless: The most mature example of an adult in this narrative is Miss Yorke, an English Teacher who encourages Staley to write and illustrate and even publish in the newspaper. Never does she raise an eyebrow about his constant unexplained absences, panic attacks or his thinly-veiled fictional allegories for his traumatic past.
• All Abusers Are Male: The reason nobody raises any alarm bells at Staley's relationship with Diane. Though he doesn't tell anyone over eighteen, even Maria, who is mostly a voice of reason for him, doesn't suggest anything beyond 'Be Careful.'
• All Men Are Perverts: Connor, Trent's jock friend, has frequent sexcapades which he shares with Trent and Keith in explicit detail. They both expect him to do the same once he starts sleeping with Di, which he does only reluctantly and awkwardly. It backfires horribly when he accidentally reveals this to Diane.
• All There in the Manual: The original 2016 Web Version still exists in some form, and it expands on Staley's novel as well as provides other Aborted Arcs, such as Trent's position on the School Newspaper, the way he influences the people around him, and his autism diagnosis, which is never mentioned but heavily implied in the final 2021 version.
• Alpha Bitch: Caitlyn Newell, a girl who terrorizes Trent with bombastic homophobic/transphobic language (Trent is a Cisman, but this was the late 2000's). Later on Leo Anderson sexually assaults her, and she meets Trent in a counselor's office where they commiserate over their mutual abusive pasts and traumatic lives. The Epilogue reveals that they founded an anonymlous help line for troubled teens at their High School.
• Amazon Chaser: Trent loves Maria like a sister, but could never date her because she's too sweet and waifish. Diane, a badass Goth Tom Boy in her early twenties who's both stronger than him and littered with tattoos and piercings, has him dumbstruck with love (or hormones). It backfires horribly when she starts abusing him.
• An Aesop: Idolizing somebody is just as dehumanizing as objectifying them, and while you can't control whatever traumatic experiences you go through, only you can choose to do the hard work of healing from them.
• Anti-Love Song: The poem that closes out the novel, See You At Armageddon.
• Anti-Role Model: Trent does terribly in school, works a minimum wage job, smokes cigars, drinks hard liquor, self-mutilates to cope with his problems and completely disregards the legal ramifications of dating a woman seven years older than him.
• Apocalyptic Log: Staley's short story, Fetal Attraction, in which the protagonist "Beaumont" chronicles being hunted his whole life by an apparition which turns out to be The Ghost of his Twin Sister who died in the womb with him. It ends with her absorbing him, and him becoming the adult woman she was meant to be. To a lesser degree, the book itself qualifies as one, since it depicts one person's spiral into madness and self-destruction. Luckily Staley survives his Creator Breakdown, and makes a semi-successful Creator Recovery.
• Appearance Angst: Trent believes himself "not recognizably human" because of his emaciation, perpetually baggy eyes and what everyone around him declares a totally androgynous appearance. Di later appears to value these traits, thinking of him as a Pretty Boy Bishōnen, but it's later implied these are just predatory grooming tactics.
• Arc Words: "I am the Dreamer, you are the Dream." Said first by Trent's Sleep Paralysis Demon, then in a dream Diane inspires, then by himself, to his own written works; showing he has taken control of his own destiny and that while he loves his work, he will no longer destroy himself to produce it. Also "Life is life, and she does not bend/To the wishes and wills of Gods or Men."
• Artists Are Attractive: The only reason anyone tolerates Trent Staley is because they like his art, though whether he's really as physically unattractive as he and everyone else believes is up for discussion.
• Babies Ever After: The Epilogue explains that Keith Dingar, Trent's sex-obsessed friend and Tabs, the Drug Dealer, go on to get married and have a son - Keith Dingbar, Junior. Connor goes on to have three children by two successive wives.
• Barbaric Bully: Both Vance, Trent's older brother, who starves him and constantly insults him and his artistic bent at every turn, and Leo Anderson, a kid who Trent goes to school with who is later arrested for statutory rape and sentenced to prison.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: Diane lives with two other college girls, and their apartment looks like this when Trent gets there for the first time.
• Beautiful Dreamer: Trent awakes to Diane, watching him sleep. It's later revealed to be a lot more sinister than sweet.
• Big Brother Bully: Trent's adult brother, Vance, was once his favorite person in the world. Scenes of them bonding and having fun before the car accident litter the book in flashbacks. Because of his brain damage, Vance becomes a perpetually enraged Jerkass who essentially forces Trent to live in his garage by antagonizing him every time he comes inside the house.
• Black Comedy: Everywhere, all the time. Staley's a Deadpan Snarker about everything, tragic or comical, that happens over the book's 130,000 words.
• Blatant Lies: Trent, in multiple footnotes, asks for audience feedback. He assures us that if we feel upset with anything in the book, we can request free pastries at his personal email, [e-mail].
• Body Horror: Both Trent and Diane are enamoured with this trope, and Trent's written work makes extensive use of it, to varying levels of aesthetic success.
• Book Smart: Staley is surprisingly cultured, presumably because his parents were perfectionist WASPs before the accident took their lives.
• Broken Bird: Trent and Diane, who mistakenly believe they can fix each other. Later on, we find out both Tabs and Caitlyn Newell are these, too.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Trent was encouraged by his parents and brother to pursue his art and was lovingly supported by his family before the car wreck that took his parents and his brother's sanity. Now he just barely passes classes and obsessively seeks gratification through cigars, alcohol and his older girlfriend while only producing art to ease his constant emotional distress.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: Supposedly this happened to Keith Dingbar in seventh grade, though nobody can agree on where in the school it happened. More important, however, is that Keith himself never denies it.
• Cigar Chomper: Staley has a taste for cigars, inherited from his dead father. Roger likes them too, and Connor and Keith have them when they hang out with Trent outside school. Staley and Rodge even have favorite brands - Camachos and Macanudos, respectively.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Diane seems very relaxed at first, until she finds about Maria. Then she proceeds to almost drive her car off the road, 'explaining' why she has 'challenges' trusting either her or her boyfriend.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Both of the short stories Trent shows us, The 'Suicide' of Redford Tandon and Fetal Attraction, are in this vein. To a lesser degree, so is his novel, Midnight City. He openly references H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and Clive Barker as influences.
• Closet Gay: Roger.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Trent is obsessed with surreal imagery, dark horror and science fiction, and sometimes stays awake for days on end until he hallucinates. Diane's fairly strange too, breeding snakes and covered in tattoos. In the late 2000's, these were all very unusual traits. To a lesser degree, Tabs, the drug-dealer and Maria, Trent's friend and coworker, are as well. When Trent asks if Maria can keep his secret about Diane's age, her response is "Los Chupacabras entran, pero no pueden salir!" delivered in a harsh whisper, as if it's deadly serious. When Staley eventually figures out what it means, he does not respond with perplexion, but with "Where the fuck are they going, Ticonderoga?" Tabs wears heavy rings and is so poorly coordinated she accidentally strikes herself head-on with one, giving herself a black eye. Her response is to laugh about it.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Maria is this to Trent, constantly trying to reign him in both at their workplace (where he criticizes how poorly hipsters treat the literary classics they leave strewn around and their atrocious taste in coffee) and in school (where he viciously retaliates against both abusive peers and teachers alike). Roger is this to a lesser degree, constantly trying to get Staley to put his creative skills and inclinations towards more constructive, healthy outlets.
• Cluster F-Bomb: It's said close to 600 times in this 130,000-word novel. Interestingly, it's never said by Maria or Roger, and it's almost totally barren from Staley's novel, stories or poems.
• Cringe Comedy: From everyone and everything.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Near the end of the book Trent slits his wrists and mutilates his chest and uses an open notebook to soak up his own blood. We see the results of this, on pages 254-255.
• The Cutie: Maria is exceedingly kind and gentle to everyone and everything around her.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Trent, Vance, Diane. It's like a trauma contest.
• Dark World: Where Trent's Novel, Midnight City, takes place.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Trent gets an anonymous letter in his binder that states he is "A Queer, Homosexual Faggot" with a note on the bottom that states "P.S. Your also gay." He isn't even offended, because the idiocy of that statement amuses him.
• Destructive Romance: Diane coddles Trent and nurtures his dependence on her, and in turn he does everything he can to please her even when she threatens suicide, antagonizes him and flat-out physically assaults him. Things quickly devolve from unhealthy codependency to uncompromising abuse and manipulation.
• The Dreaded: Trent has a reputation as a psychotic "future school shooter" because of his dark art and writing, and his eccentric behaviors that result from his post-traumatic stress and untreated mental conditions.
• Domestic Abuse: Diane, slowly but surely, devolves into an abuser as the book progresses.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Trent hallucinates during his suicide and bleeds profusely all the way to his outdoor shower, where his brain leads him through a hyper-vivid recollection of his earlier memories, when his parents were alive and Vance was still himself.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Trent is drugged and implied to be raped by Diane, but he can't handle the stress and trauma of addressing this and chooses to believe Diane's Blatant Lies. After he tries to tell his friend, Connor, Connor writes it off as Trent just "being a pussy."
• Driven to Suicide: Trent talks casually about ending his own life to ease his post-traumatic stress. Diane uses suicide threats to prevent Trent from telling anyone about their relationship, or resisting her advances. At the end of the book, Staley finally tries - unsuccessfully - to go through with it.
• Dysfunction Junction: Everyone is a disturbed, vulgar wreck of a person with exactly two exceptions (four, if you count the two named teachers that appear on the sidelines.)
• Ephebophile: Diane Bourdon, full-stop. The Epilogue reveals that after her suicide in 2014, a stash of illicit photographs of both Trent and other boys, some even younger than him, were among her belongings.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Both Maria and Diane, even though their personalities couldn't be more different.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: Connor lost his virginity at thirteen, and has slept with at least a dozen girls, which he makes known to literally everyone he comes across. Trent loses his virginity to Diane and they have sex frequently, but Caitlyn Newell, the School Slut, is actually a virgin, which she reveals to Trent after Leo Anderson assaults her near the end of the novel. It's mentioned in passing that Maria and Nicholas have a decent sex life, although Maria refuses to go into details (and Trent doesn't want that anyway), and Keith is heavily implied to lose his virginity to Tabitha, who he later goes on to marry and have a son with.
• Everybody Smokes: Trent and Roger smoke cigars, Diane smokes menthols, and Tabs, Connor and Keith all smoke weed. Maria is the only one who's exempt, though she tolerates her boyfriend Nicholas smoking socially on occasion provided he brushes his teeth before kissing her again.
• Extreme Libido: Keith Dingbar, Trent's short, acne-riddled friend with an excruciating voice, is unhealthily obsessed with sex for an adolescent boy. For an adolescent. Boy.
• Fetus Terrible: Trent writes a short story after finding out Diane had a miscarriage two years before she met him in which a man absorbs his sister in the womb. She proceeds to haunt him as a fetal ghost before absorbing his personality, in a twisted metaphor for how Diane has completely sublimated his personality by way of conditioning his absolute dependence on her.
• Fictional Document: Trent's surreal urban horror story, Midnight City, of which we see four chapters.
• Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind: Maria Garcia, in contrast to Trent Staley, who looks basically normal but is mentally deranged. Maria wears only blacks and stripes, paints her face white and sometimes looks like 'she could win a Siouxsie Sioux lookalike contest,' but she's by far the most psychologically stable and socially well-adjusted character in the entire novel.
• Free-Range Children: Trent's brother ignores him to the extent that when he leaves the house for extended periods, all he does is ask where he is in a text. Trent always tells him he's at Connor's, even if he's with Di, and Vance just dumbly accepts it.
• Freudian Excuse: Diane lashes out at Trent for having a female friend or not yielding to her demands and makes threats of self-mutilation to keep him in line. We later find out that this is because her daughter died in a miscarriage, and her parents believed she took some kind of medication to consciously abort the child and kicked her out of the house. Suddenly her maternal, protective behavior is cast in a much more Squick and disturbing light.
• Garage Band: Maria's Boyfriend, Nicholas, plays guitar and sings in a power trio called 'Revisceration.' Trent describes their music as sounding like "scratchy monotone over three chords, with lyrics like what Korn would write after a lobotomy." Trent does however provide them with an album cover, so it seems like he's a good sport about it.
• Gilded Cage: Both Vance, who expects Trent to live with him for the rest of his life out of fear that Trent isn't capable of holding a 'real job' or functioning in society, and Diane, who expects him to stay with her and accept her abusive manipulation until he is of legal age and they can get married.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Maria absolutely refuses to swear, making her stand out both as an outwardly gothic and creepy-looking girl but also among the main cast, who all swear wantonly.
• Goth Girls Know Magic: Di's friend, Olive, is "uber-goth" and also a Wiccan. Di reads Tarot Cards and believes in Astrology, which Trent thinks is superstitious nonsense. Of course, he keeps this to himself.
• Groin Attack: Leo Anderson kicks Trent in the balls, in an attempt to impress Caitlyn Newell. Trent recounts an incident when Connor had some kind of an STD, and chose to 'remedy' it by using a cue-tip and peroxide. He did this in Trent's outdoor shower, while Trent and Keith sat back getting drunk and laughing about it.
• Henpecked Husband: Nicholas is a leather-clad, muscular metal guitarist who stands six-one and is one of very few people Trent could imagine actually matching Connor Pressman in a fight. His girlfriend, Maria Garcia, is five-three and could easily be thrown across the room by Trent, let alone her boyfriend. But Maria is the one making rules for Nicholas, and doesn't allow him to drink hard liquor or let his room get messy, and makes him carry around a toothbrush in case he needs to smoke socially with Trent or anyone else. It's amusing, until the end of the book when they break up, off-screen.
• High-School Hustler: Tabitha "Tabs" Dingbar not only manages to deal drugs, but also liquors, cigars, vintage comics and video games, and even antique Clark Ashton Smith anthologies for Trent and his more well-read friends. Rumors spread that she sells used underwear and naked photos, though this is never confirmed beyond the implication given in the epilogue, where it's revealed that, as Keith's wife, she has a successful stint on Only Fans.
• Hollywood Autism: Averted. Staley's autism is never even mentioned, although the Web Original version of the novel Night Life actually ended with him getting his diagnosis.
• Hypocritical Humor: The original name for Staley's protagonist in his novel, Midnight City, was Kurt Jagger. He rejects this as being 'too obvious' and 'gimmicky.' Trent himself is obviously named for Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Layne Staley, of Alice in Chains.
• Innocently Insensitive: Trent openly calls things "Retarded" or "Gay" even though he himself is an (undiagnosed) autistic person and his friend, Roger, is a closeted gay teen. Averted with Caitlyn Newell and Leo Anderson, who openly call Trent a "Manlady" and "Tranny" because of his percieved androgyny. Values Dissonance as this was common in the American Northeast in the late 2000's.
• Jerkass: Leo Anderson, Caitlyn Newell, and Trent's brother Vance are all openly malicious to him without any sign of remorse until the very end, when Trent walks in on Vance crying over a photo album of their dead parents and Caitlyn Reveals that Leo sexually assaulted her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Caitlyn Newell and Vance Staley both come to empathize with Trent before the book is over.
• Lack of Empathy: Trent violently despises his abusers, at least when the book starts. By the end he learns that his brother and Caitlyn Newell are people too, and extends his sympathies to them when they suffer like he does.
• Keet: Maria leans very far into the 'perky' side of Perky Goth.
• Kind Hearted Cat Lover: Trent feeds the stray cats in his neighborhood, who he names things like Cobain, Tupac, Picasso, Five-Lives, etc. Maria has a tattoo of her first cat on her arm.
• The Lad-ette: Diane is tall, muscular, tattooed, a hard drinker and a smoker who swears just as much as Trent and keeps both snakes and spiders.
• Latino Is Brown: Subverted with Maria, who paints her face chalky white to be Gothic. Played Straight with Salvador/Saldar, the protagonist of Midnight City.
• Last-Name Basis: Diane only ever refers to Trent as 'Stales' when she's happy with him. When she calls him Trent, this is universally a pretense for suicide threats and nervous breakdowns that she uses to abuse and control him. Other characters alternate between 'Staley' and 'Trent' interchangeably.
• Loser Protagonist: Trent is universally despised by literally hundreds of people in his school.
• Lust Object: Trent worries about treating Diane like one, all while she obviously - if only to the audience, and not the protagonist - grooms him to be hers.
• Manipulative Bastard: Diane nurtures Trent's dependency, and seemingly knows she is the only person who provides him any form of validation or affection, physical or otherwise. It seems sweet and maternal...at first. We later find out that she is grooming him not (just) to meet her sexual needs, whether he's comfortable or not, but as a surrogate child to replace her stillborn daughter.
• Mask of Sanity: Di is even more severely disturbed than Staley is, but as she's older, she's just better at hiding it. Trent's issues are screamingly obvious to everyone around him, it's just that nobody except Di and his few friends actually care.
• Metal Head: Maria's Boyfriend, Nicholas, is apparently the nicest person Trent has ever met.

• Morality Pet: Maria and Roger are this to Trent. Whenever he comes off as too cynically hateful, they both bring out his better characteristics.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Kent J. Starrett wrote all of Staley's fiction, and added the illustrations, to boot!

• Named After Somebody Famous: Trent is named for Trent Reznor and Layne Staley. Amusingly, he planned on naming the protagonist of Midnight City after Kurt Cobain and Mick Jagger, but decided this was "gimmicky." In addition, the protagonist of one of his short stories is named for Chuck Beaumont, a writer for The Twilight Zone (1959).
• Nervous Wreck: Staley has crippling social anxiety, likely as a result of constant bullying and undiagnosed autism. Di's manipulations only make this anxiety worse.
• Never My Fault: Trent blames his miserable life on his traumatic past and fails to take any responsibility for what happens to him until the end of the book, when he finally forces himself to break up with Diane, and learns to forgive his brother who was just as much a victim as himself.
• Nice Girl: Maria Garcia is the only sane character in this story. Nicholas might be too, but we never see enough of him to get a sense of whether he's totally stable or not. On that note.....
• Nice Guy: Rodge is pretty stable and do-good too, even if he's not as thoroughly explored as even Maria.
• Nightmare Sequence: Trent's nightmares fuel his fiction, specifically his sleep paralysis succubus, The Butterfly, which is depicted in his artistic style and other dreams in which the people around him morph into monsters. Trent is obsessed with Carl Jung, and believes his dreams illustrate things that he's unable to consciously accept in his waking life.
• Non-Malicious Monster: After Trent and Diane spend his holiday break together he writes a Chapter of Midnight City in which Saldar and Trash meet a friendly, boneless monster they nickname 'Floppy.' He's on the cover of the book, in the bottom right corner.
• Noodle Incident: At one point, Trent charges out of Diane's room late in the night, panicking. She tried to do "something" to him, and it apparently damaged him so badly that he wouldn't allow her to touch him again until after she's washed her hands. We never find out what it was, but it's clear that she totally violated Trent's boundaries and did something very disturbingly unconventional to him.
• Only Sane Man: Trent feels this way, though it's obvious to the audience that he's just as demented as everyone else in his immediate environment. Played Straight with Roger, Trent's straight-edged journalist friend, and Maria Garcia, who tries to keep him grounded in reality and make sure he doesn't completely sink into madness. Everyone else passes the Idiot Ball around enough to make you wonder what's in the water in Rhode Island.
• Parental Neglect: Trent's legal guardian, his adult brother, makes him live in a garage, doesn't feed him, and constantly gaslights him.
• Pet the Dog: Trent gives one of these to Caitlyn Newell near the end, when she reveals she's been assaulted by Leo Anderson. She gives one back in the form of letting him tell her his story, and promising - and keeping - its secrecy. Also literally in that Trent feeds stray cats around his neighborhood and names them all after artists and musicians he likes.
• Perky Goth: Staley's Friend, Maria Garcia, is a petite gothic girl who loves ponies and kittens as well as skulls and tombstones. She continually tries to be kind to Trent and drag him out of his constant creative misery and is the only one who's fully sympathetic to him when he reveals Diane's abusive behaviors.
• Period Piece: Of The Aughts, featuring a fictional website that combines MySpace with Vampirefreaks, blatant homophobia and vicious bullying on all sides in Staley's High School. Trent himself uses very dated slurs, though he thankfully doesn't seem to be truly ableist or homophobic; just badly influenced by the toxic environment around him.
• Personal Horror: Trent's fiction reflects his deeply held psychic scars and paranoid fears.
• Pink Elephants: While drunk and on painkillers in an attempt to kill himself, Trent hallucinates that assorted technicolor demons and solid black shadow beings with the faces of his friends and family are assaulting him. The only way to curb the hyper-realistic sensory overload is through Self-Harm, though this only causes him to pass out from blood loss. Thankfully, it's not actually fatal.
• Pretty Boy: How both Diane and Maria see Staley, though only the former romantically.
• Posthumous Character: Vance and Diane are both revealed to have died by suicide in the Epilogue.
• Purple Prose: Trent has a gigantic vocabulary, and when writing his own fiction shows himself to be completely incapable of restraining it.
• Quest for Sex: Subverted. Trent's out to find somebody who understands and appreciates his personality, though all other male characters act as if this is their life's only purpose.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Trent's novel, Midnight City, reflects the events of his day-to-day life. When MC opens, 'Saldar' awakes to an abandoned world full of monsters, wondering what has happened to his parents. Saldar is the same age that Trent was when his parents died - twelve. When Trent meets Diane, an obsessive, morbid grown woman who takes an interest in his work, Saldar meets Trash, a slightly-older teenage girl who hoards garbage and hides in a dumpster from the monsters (Saldar and Trash even have the same age difference - Saldar is twelve, and Trash is nineteen). When Trent and Diane's relationship falls apart, Trash dies; and when Trent fails to kill himself and rediscovers his will to live, Saldar revives Trash through supernatural means and ends the book with the two of them ready to face the oncoming threats of the surreal, incomprehensible Midnight City.
• Recursive Canon: Not only are Midnight City and Staley's body of poetry real works within this world, but the book itself is presented as Staley's own written account of what happened to him in 2009.
• Roman à Clef: Kent Starrett's parents are alive and he is the oldest child of his siblings, and he didn't start dating anyone until he was nineteen. However, the book draws heavily on childhood abuse and psychological traumas he suffered as a teenager, and both Trent and Starrett are high-functioning autistic artists who survived a sexual assault(s) by a woman, and multiple resultant suicide attempts.
• Rhode Island: The book is set in the fictional town of Wickwire, somewhere between Newport and Providence.
• Sadist Teacher: Staley carries around everything in a gigantic, seemingly disorganized binder. A Science Teacher embarrasses Trent in front of the entire class by asking for him: "Raise your hand if your name is Trent Staley," and telling him he will take charge of organizing his assignments since he "Obviously isn't competent enough to do it himself." Trent's response? "You know what I got in this binder? Your motherfucking wife, why don't I open it up so you can say hi?"
• Sanity Slippage: The Protagonists of both The "Suicide" of Redford Tandon and Fetal Attraction. In the novel's reality, this happens to Diane, though whether she starts to slip because of the stresses and risks of a relationship with a sixteen-year-old or whether she was just better at hiding it in the beginning is debatable. Staley gets this too, though thankfully he gets better. Keeping in mind that "better" does not mean "Cured."
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Whenever Staley talks with his friends, it might be about Di or what he's going through, but the characters are all still teenagers. Their short attention spans result in a number of random tangents which seem only vaguely related to the topics of conversation at hand.
• Self-Harm: Trent notices a boy on Altworks.com (a thinly-veiled fictionalization of Myspace.com and Vampirefreaks.com) who posts pictures of his grotesquely mutilated torso, to the vocal approval of his dozens of female followers. Trent later takes a broken bottle to his torso and wrists, leaving him Covered in Scars for the rest of his life. He uses an open notebook to soak up the blood, referring to the resulting 'paintings' as 'bloodstain abstractions.' According to an interview, Kent Starrett based this on his real behavior in his teens and early twenties.
• Sex as Rite-of-Passage: Deconstructed. Trent learns the hard way that somebody having sex with you doesn't necessarily mean they care about you.
• Sex Equals Love: Trent, Connor, and all of the male cast seem to believe this. Trent gets a rude awakening with the book's Surprisingly Realistic Outcome.
• Sexual Karma: Subverted. Connor Pressman has lots of good sex, but he doesn't think of women as anything beyond objects; and when Trent and Diane have sex, it's a smokescreen to ignore their crippling codependency.
• Shout-Out: Trent names a lot of chapters after either works of art he likes (Venus in Inks and The Menaced Assassin) or songs he likes (Glycerine and Don't Call Me Daughter). One of his short stories is called Fetal Attraction and is about a fetal ghost out to kill her depressive, alcoholic twin brother. Perhaps more relevently, both the 2016 and 2019 web versions reference "The Storms that took out East Kingstown in '99." This was edited out for the 2021 edition. His novel is likely named after a song by M83. He references various horror authors such as Stanley Weinbaum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Bloch, and Charles Beaumont, among others. John Callahan of Pelswick and Mo Willems get shout outs as influences on Staley's art style.
• Shower of Angst: Trent does this a lot, seeing as one of his few luxuries is an outdoor shower. Most significantly, when he tries to kill himself near the end of the novel, he does so in the shower.
• Slut-Shaming: Trent does a lot of this, though he realizes the error of his ways when it's revealed Caitlyn Newell, the girl who torments him, is a virgin who just has rumors spread around by guys like Leo Anderson.
• Statuesque Stunner: Diane is as tall as Trent, and he knows it.
• Straight Gay: Roger is gay, and is very adept at hiding it.
• STD Immunity: Lampshaded as Diane has had her tubes tied and Trent is a virgin. Averted with Connor Pressman, who gets some kind of urethral infection and tries to 'cure' it with a cue-tip and hydrogen peroxide. It seems to work, but it's obviously agonizing.
• The Stoner: One of Trent's friends is a drug-dealer named Tabs. She sells him cigars, beer and rum, which he mixes with Coca-Cola in a coke bottle and brings to school. She also sells him the painkillers he uses to unsuccessfully commit suicide at the end of the novel.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: There is no way a relationship between a sixteen-year-old, parentless boy and a twenty-three-year-old woman still grieving her dead daughter can ever come to anything like a happy ending.
• Surreal Horror: All of Staley's stories, poetry and his novel are this, to the most extensive possible degree.
• Talkative Loon: This is how the Student Body views Trent, because his fiction and art is so downright bizarre.
• Taught by Experience: Trent, like Starrett, is entirely self-taught as both an artist and writer.
• Teens Are Monsters: Trent carries a huge binder around because every year Caitlyn Newell and her friends find his locker, and write "Virgin 4 Life" in permanent marker on it, so that he can't use it anymore. Literally everyone outside Trent's circle of friends knocks his writing and refer to him as "crazy" or "retarded" for his career choice, and physical fights are a weekly occurrence at Wickwire High.
• The Teetotaler: Both Maria Garcia and Roger don't drink or do drugs. Trent keeps his drinking a secret from Maria, who strongly voices her disapproval and concern over his drinking Rum-In-Coke during School Hours. Roger's not above smoking a cigar with Trent on occasion, however.
• Totally Radical: In-universe, Di sometimes uses outdated slang that gives Trent Mood Whiplash when he realizes just how old she actually is. Out-of-universe, the audience might feel this way by the late 2000's vocabulary of 'mad,' 'shady,' 'sick,' etc.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Staley could get better advice than what he gets from Connor Pressman, whose attitudes towards women aren't exactly enlightened.
• Troubled Teen: Staley himself. Also Caitlyn Newell, one of his tormentors.
• Unkempt Beauty: Trent feels this way of Di whenever she's home with him.
• Urban Fantasy: Trent's Novel, Midnight City, revolves around children waking up in an abandoned neighborhood. At night they're haunted by surreal monsters, which Trent brings to life through his photoshopped/traditional artwork.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Diane seems like this, at first. Later she unleashes her violence on Trent when she finds out Trent has a female friend, Maria. She plays it off as being afraid of her age being revealed and being sent to prison, but adult readers will catch the obvious abusive nature of her actions.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Connor and Trent aren't above taking jabs at each other, though at the end, Connor's inability to empathize with Trent's abuse by Diane drives a wedge between them.
• Weakness Turns Her On: It's strongly implied Diane is attracted to Staley's vulnerability.
• Wham Line: Diane, in a drunken breakdown, cries "I didn't kill my baby." This reveals she had a miscarriage, and that she was blamed for this by her parents. It also reveals that Diane's controlling, manipulative behavior towards Trent isn't just because she is trying to groom him for sex, but as a surrogate child.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: An epilogue explains what happened to the characters, except Staley himself, beyond that he "still lives." Vance commits suicide, Diane commits suicide after being exposed as an Ephebophile, Maria moves to Brooklyn, Connor to Colorado with his second wife and new son, Keith and Tabitha get married and move to Indianapolis, and Nicholas becomes a music teacher whose band, Revisceration, enjoys local popularity.
• Wild Teen Party: Subverted. Trent, Connor and Keith get hammered at his garage once or twice a month, and Connor assures Trent this is what most real 'Teen Parties' consist of.
• Wretched Hive: Wickwire High, where kids openly deal drugs and start fires, bullying is totally unchecked, and rumors spread like an epidemic. Trent mentions in passing that two seniors were caught having sex in the stairwell the year he was a freshmen, a kid was stripped nude and thrown out into the halls, at least one or two suicides occur every year, and most importantly, Staley is able to mix Rum in his Soda Bottles without significant worry as to whether or not he'll get caught.
• Women Are Wiser: Or rather, Maria specifically is wiser than everyone else. She gives Trent the most level-headed advice on sex and dating, even if she still doesn't identify that Diane being seven years older than Staley is a gigantic red flag. Averted with Tabs, who's just as dumb and reckless as any of the male cast, and subverted with Diane, who uses this trope as a smoke screen.

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