Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is a threshold in the novel’s chronology: a night of isolation for Jack Twist, an inexplicable fear of the moon, and an approaching rupture in Zebediah Lomack’s obsessive lunar world. The sequence moves from an ordinary city evening into the Christmas holiday, where images of the moon become entangled with forgotten people and memories. Its importance lies not in celebration but in the way the familiar calendar and familiar moon frame experiences that the characters cannot explain or control.

Jack’s Christmas Eve

Earlier in the night, Jack leaves a knoll and heads toward the houses to the southwest, where his car is parked. Planning a crime, ordinarily almost as exciting and satisfying to him as carrying it out, brings no pleasure. He recognizes that he is changing but does not know why. This loss of appetite for his former occupation supplies the scene’s first disturbance: before the moon appears, Jack’s usual measure of excitement has already failed him.

Near the houses, the night seems to brighten. Jack looks up and sees the moon swelling on the horizon, apparently enormous because of the perspective of its early ascent. The sight gives him an inner chill unrelated to winter. When he says the moon’s name aloud, he shudders and feels an irrational urge to flee and hide, as though its light might dissolve him. The fear passes within a minute, but the moon continues to unsettle him as he walks to the car. The moment turns an ordinary celestial sight into an immediate bodily threat without explaining its cause.

By the time Jack has driven into New Haven and taken Interstate 95, the incident has faded from his mind. His attention returns to Jenny, his comatose wife, whose condition weighs on him more heavily than usual at Christmas. Later, alone at his apartment window with a bottle of Becks, he imagines that nobody across the breadth of the city can be lonelier on Christmas Eve. The sequence sets private grief beside the unexplained lunar terror: the moon’s effect briefly interrupts his thoughts, but loneliness and concern for Jenny reclaim them.

The passage into Christmas Day

The narration marks the change of date explicitly, moving from the Christmas Eve scene to Christmas Day. This transition matters because the lunar disturbance does not resolve at midnight. Instead, the holiday continues into a new sequence in Reno, Nevada, where Zebediah Lomack’s fixation has become a crisis. The book places the two experiences close together in the calendar while keeping their circumstances distinct: Jack’s fear is brief and soon forgotten, whereas Zeb’s relationship with the moon has grown into a consuming pattern.

The contrast gives the holiday sequence its shape. For Jack, the moon appears suddenly, frightens him, and recedes from consciousness as he turns back to Jenny. For Zeb, lunar images fill his home and his attention; by Christmas night, the images have become the surface on which lost identities return. Christmas therefore marks not a single shared gathering but a chronological hinge joining separate characters through a recurring and increasingly disturbing image.

Zebediah Lomack’s Christmas-night revelation

By Christmas Day, Zeb has sunk into despair. He loads a shotgun, places it on his kitchen table, and tells himself he will use it if he cannot rid himself of the moon material before midnight. The extremity of that resolve shows how far his fascination has moved from innocent curiosity. It also gives the holiday a starkly different atmosphere from Jack’s lonely evening: for Zeb, the night carries the immediate possibility of death.

The obsession had begun the summer before last with watching the moon and stars from the porch while drinking Coors. In mid-September he bought a Tasco 10VR refracting telescope and books on amateur astronomy. By early October, he thought about the moon continually, dreamed about it, and had carried his decorating project beyond his bedroom. A color photograph of the moon, purchased in fifty copies, covered the living-room ceiling and walls; he even taped copies over the windows. With the furniture removed, the room had become a private planetarium whose display never changed. The accumulation of pictures turns the home into a physical record of how thoroughly the fixation has taken over.

On Christmas night, lying beneath those images, Zeb notices a name written across one moon picture: Dominick. He recognizes his own handwriting but cannot remember writing it. Other posters bear the names Ginger, Faye, and Ernie. He checks the remaining images but finds no more names. Although he cannot identify Dominick, Ginger, or Faye, and knows only two people named Ernie who are not close friends, the names feel charged with an importance he cannot recover. He senses that these people have played a crucial part in his life and that remembering them matters to his sanity and survival.

A holiday shaped by memory and dread

As Zeb looks at the names, a long-forgotten memory seems to swell toward consciousness. He intuits that recovering it will bring back both the identities of the four people and the origins of his feverish fascination with, and underlying fear of, the moon. Yet the approach of recognition does not reassure him: as the memory grows, so does his fear, until he sweats and shakes uncontrollably. The scene ends at the threshold of recollection rather than with an explanation of what he remembers.

The Christmas sequence thus binds seasonal loneliness, bodily fear, and returning memory without making them identical. Jack’s brief encounter with the moon gives way to thoughts of Jenny; Zeb’s moon-filled room leaves him facing names he cannot place and a past he can almost reach. The holiday’s movement from Christmas Eve into Christmas Day and night provides the temporal frame for that contrast, while the moon links otherwise separate experiences. What begins as a familiar sight in the winter sky becomes, for both men, an intrusion into ordinary consciousness—fleeting for Jack, and overwhelming for Zeb.