Grand Forks

Grand Forks appears in a single, darkly comic anecdote related by a pathology clerk at the Eastern Maine Medical Center. The clerk tells Louis Creed about a man who died on a fishing trip in Aroostook County and whose body was shipped home to Grand Forks, Minnesota. Due to a series of errors by the airline, the corpse was first sent to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo, North Dakota, before finally reaching Grand Forks. By the time it arrived, the embalming fluid had failed, and the body had become so badly decomposed that it smelled like "a spoiled pork roast" and made six baggage handlers sick. This story, told with grim humor, underscores the novel's preoccupation with the physical reality of death and the ways in which the systems designed to manage it can fail, reducing a human being to a grotesque, mishandled parcel. The anecdote also serves to contrast the clinical, bureaucratic handling of death with the raw, supernatural horror that Louis will soon confront in the woods of Ludlow.