Under the Whispering Door

by T.J. Klune

“It’s never enough, is it? Time. We always think we have so much of it, but when it really counts, we don’t have enough at all.”

If I could get a reader to take away anything from this novel, it’d be these lines spoken by Nelson. Even now, as I write this, it’s late January 2023, and we’re approaching the three-year anniversary since The House in the Cerulean Sea came out. It seems as if just yesterday, I was gearing up to release Under the Whispering Door, nervous about how readers would respond to such a deeply personal bit of writing. Time awaits no one. We are all prisoners of time because every single second that passes brings us closer to our inevitable end. We may not always focus on it, but we know it’s there, waiting. Which is why these words spoken by Nelson are my favorite part of the book. Nelson is, in a way, on borrowed time. He knows this. He did not stay because he thought Hugo needed to be fixed somehow. He didn’t stay because of Mei or Apollo. And he certainly didn’t stick around because of Wallace. Nelson knows time. He sees the passing of it from his spot in front of the fireplace. He also knows that every second counts to the living and the dead, and Wallace needs to realize that. Because of Nelson, Wallace can now focus on what is perhaps the most important thing of all: what will you do with the time you have left?