This is a very disturbing and yet fascinating book. David Darby is a big, tattooed technician for a trauma-site clean-up crew. He spends every night cleaning up the remains of suicide and murders. His son, Whitley, called The Kid, is a sixth-grader who is a talented artist but who is badly bullied at school. Darby's wife / The Kid's mother, Lucy, died under some fairly mysterious circumstances a year earlier and since her death Darby has not been able to sleep in the house and The Kid has not spoken.

This is a difficult story to read and yet I couldn't quite put it down. Darby is trying to be a good father but he's dealing with demons of his own. The Kid is so traumatized both by the loss of his mother (whom he does not believe is dead) and the constant bullying he endures, that he is ashamed to let his father know what he is putting up with at school. O'Connor does a very good job of developing the characters of this pain-filled father-son relationship.

The writing style takes some getting used to. The POV cuts back and forth between Darby and The Kid, often without any warning at all. Since I read it on Kindle I felt maybe there were missing line-breaks because I often didn't know which character's perspective was being written about. There is a good deal of repetition -- especially with Darby -- but, once I adjusted to it I felt it was an effective way of expressing the kind of obsessive thought patterns Darby was slipping in to.

I was happy that the ending was uplifting because, given the story, it could have been quite dark. This is not for everyone but it is a fascinating character study of two interesting people.