White and Black

White and Black names the opposed forces through which the novel understands goodness and evil, but it is not a simple division between harmless light and triumphant darkness. Kurt Barlow presents White as a real power that can be embodied in symbols, faith, and protective acts, while insisting that Black has the advantage of patience, craft, and psychological corrosion. The conflict therefore operates simultaneously as supernatural cosmology, moral argument, and a test of whether belief can become action.

Definition and Moral Polarity

White and Black are described as competing forms of power rather than merely labels for virtuous and wicked characters. Barlow claims knowledge of “white magic” alongside Christian and pagan charms and potions, acknowledging that his opponents possess resources capable of resisting him. He also calls himself knowledgeable in the ways of goodness as well as evil, making the opposition a field he has studied rather than a boundary he simply ignores.

The distinction is presented most starkly through Barlow’s claim that goodness requires an act of faith, whereas evil needs only to wait. In that formulation, Black is not necessarily more intellectually profound or metaphysically greater than White; it is more opportunistic. Evil can remain passive while fear, doubt, delay, and exhaustion do their work. White, by contrast, must be enacted. Its existence becomes consequential only when someone accepts risk and converts conviction into resistance.

Barlow’s Challenge to Faith

Barlow’s recorded speech turns White and Black into a direct ideological assault on Father Callahan and the Catholic Church. He recognizes the Church as an old adversary and says that he does not underestimate it, even while mocking its rituals, its veneration of the sheep-savior, and its bread-and-wine worship. His contempt is strategically mixed with respect: he dismisses the institution rhetorically but identifies Father Callahan, joined to his Church, as the one opponent he fears.

That fear gives Barlow’s argument its force. He tells Callahan that courage, thought, coolness, and White magic together constitute a substantial defense, but immediately counters that his own greater age and craft may overcome them. He claims to be “the father of serpents,” presenting longevity and accumulated experience as weapons against a younger or less certain faith. White therefore has power, but it is not automatically victorious; its use depends on the steadiness of the person who carries it.

Barlow’s central accusation is that Callahan’s faith has become weak, soft, and rotten. He argues that Callahan doubts the value of the flame he is supposed to preserve and that love, identified as White’s talisman, has failed. The speech turns moral language into a battlefield: Barlow does not merely threaten physical harm, but attempts to make the guardian of goodness regard goodness as an empty presumption. His claim that Black will win all when the decisive move comes gives the conflict the shape of a chess game, with faith cast as the piece that may be unable to move.

White as Active Power

The novel nevertheless refuses to leave White as an abstract theological principle. During the assault in the root cellar, Ben Mears is surrounded by rats while Mark Petrie is trapped near the cellar door. Ben lifts the ax and asks it to be his strength. The gesture is neither presented as a formal prayer nor as a hesitant request; it is a command issued at the moment when belief and physical necessity converge.

The ax then displays the same eldritch fairy-light Ben has previously seen at Green’s Mortuary and in the cellar beneath the Marsten House. Power appears to run down the handle into his hands, and the rats recoil. Ben experiences a new certainty, no longer groping between belief and unbelief or fighting an opponent whose body cannot be grasped. The image makes White tangible without reducing it to a mechanical spell: the force becomes available through courage, intention, and the willingness to act for another person.

This scene also establishes a contrast with Barlow’s rhetoric. Barlow speaks through a disembodied recording, manipulating fear and doubt from a position of concealment. Ben’s power appears in immediate physical danger, where the weapon must be held and used. Black waits and speaks; White answers through embodied commitment. The ax’s light thus functions as a practical rebuttal to the idea that faith is merely language.

Knowledge, Medicine, and Uncertainty

White and Black also frame the novel’s struggle over how strange events should be understood. The investigation repeatedly passes through medical and institutional language: Daniel Francis Glick’s information is reduced to a dated record and address; Matt Burke’s household contains the ordinary equipment and distractions of modern life; and James Cody examines corpses with professional calm. When Cody compares a body to the Glick boy and observes the absence of surface lividity and rigor, medical observation becomes one of the first disciplined forms of resistance to denial.

The supernatural threat then exceeds those categories. Bodies are taken from the Cumberland County Morgue in Portland, an act described through the imagery of Boris Karloff and Mary Shelley, while Roy McDougall’s body reacts violently to daylight and retreats into shadow. The physical details—steam and moisture, yellowing skin, rolling eyes, altered breathing, and animal-like teeth—make the conflict empirically visible even as the characters struggle to name it. White and Black consequently operate not only as moral abstractions but as rival explanations of reality: institutional knowledge records symptoms, while faith and supernatural recognition identify the force behind them.

Narrative Significance

As a concept, White and Black organizes the novel’s movement from skepticism to committed resistance. Its polarity is never entirely symmetrical. Barlow describes evil as ubiquitous and patient, while goodness depends on a decision that may be delayed, doubted, or betrayed. That imbalance explains why the novel gives such weight to small acts: examining a body honestly, confronting a corpse, protecting a trapped companion, or raising a weapon with deliberate conviction.

The concept also gives the supernatural conflict a psychological dimension. Barlow’s aim is not simply to kill his enemies but to make them distrust the source of their strength. His voice tries to transform faith into embarrassment, love into hypocrisy, and ritual into empty performance. Against that assault, the ax scene supplies a different model of belief: certainty arrives not before danger but within action. White becomes credible because it changes what a frightened person can do.

In this framework, the novel’s struggle is neither a contest between equally effortless powers nor a promise that goodness will prevail automatically. Black has waiting, secrecy, age, and manipulation; White has faith, solidarity, symbols, and the capacity to act. White and Black therefore names the book’s deepest wager: evil may require only delay, but goodness becomes real when someone refuses to wait.