When reading through the Pillowman I was reminded of another book I had read a few years back, Lost Boys, By Orson Scott Card. Lost Boys seems to hold a lot of the same themes as The Pillowman. The book centers a family who moves into a house nearby a serial child molester, as the father does all he can to prevent his young daughter from being molested the family neglects their eight year old son, Stevie. Stevie begins making imaginary friends and giving them very specific names. Shortly after which their names were posted in the paper as living missing young boys. The parents immediately contact the police to investigate and interview their son about the missing young men. However, after being sent outside the house by himself to set up the Christmas lights everyone is surprised to find that Stevie's friends are no longer imaginary. The parents can now see all the lost boys standing beside Stevie, and this is when we come to terms with the fact that for the split second the parents were not watching Stevie, he was killed, making all of his friends the ghosts of young boys who have been murdered. When the police arrive they find eight child size graves, amongst which Stevie's was the last buried underneath the house the family had moved into.
In addition to the fact that both stories are so playfully gruesome one of the most common themes that I saw between the two stories was that we must not believe everything we hear and see. That our senses fool us into believing what we are told is real must be real or vice versa in that things may just be too out of the ordinary to be real at all, when in all reality they are. I juxtaposed this back to a specific quote from Pillowman;
"KATURIAN. A man comes into your room, says, 'Your mother's dead,' yeah?
MICHAL. I know my mothers dead.
KATURIAN. No, I know, but in a story. A man comes in to a room, says to another man, 'Your mother's dead.' What do we know? Do we know that the second man's mother is dead?
MICHAL. Yes.
KATURIAN. No, we don't.
MICHAL. No, we don't.
KATURIAN. All we know is that a man has come into a room and said to another man, 'Your mother is dead.' That is all we know. First rule of storytelling. 'Don't believe everything you read in the papers."
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