Anne Anderson

Anne Anderson, called Sissy by Bobbi, is Bobbi’s forty-year-old older sister. She arrives in Maine with the blunt, forceful manner of someone accustomed to making her wishes felt, determined to bring Bobbi home for good. That determination drives her into Haven, where the sister she means to rescue has been profoundly altered. Anne’s fierce attachment survives the shock, but it cannot undo the danger around Bobbi: Anne is imprisoned and made part of the machinery on which the crisis turns, and she dies in the final destruction of the apparatus.

Identity and Arrival

Anne steps off Delta flight 230 at Bangor after a delayed, uncomfortable journey. Her greeting to the stewardess is an exuberant inventory of her irritation: she is hot, the flight was rough, she hates flying, and a spilled screwdriver and drying orange juice have made the trip worse. The complaints establish her directness and comic abrasiveness before she reaches her destination; they also make clear that she has travelled despite discomfort rather than approaching the journey with quiet hesitation.

She is forty, though Bobbi has privately thought of her as someone who seemed older in outlook even in adolescence. The sisters’ difference in temperament is present before they meet again: Anne speaks and acts with emphatic certainty, while the narrative of her plans shows how completely she expects the family to fall into the shape she chooses.

The Decision to Bring Bobbi Home

Before Anne leaves for Haven, she expects Bobbi to attend their mother’s funeral. Anne has told a lie that she anticipates Bobbi will deny, but she judges that the family will remember the accusation more readily than the denial. She imagines that one of their uncles might confront Bobbi, and that drunkenness could make the encounter especially volatile. The lie is not enough to satisfy her, however. Anne decides that Bobbi must come home not merely for the funeral but permanently, and resolves to see that it happens herself.

Anne leaves in a rental car at eight the next morning. After one wrong turn she reaches the Troy–Haven town line by nine-thirty. At first she feels keyed up and eager; during the last fifteen or twenty miles, that anticipation drains away and a familiar near-migraine begins. The change in her physical state marks the approach to Haven as a threshold rather than a simple homecoming. She nevertheless drives across the town line and continues toward Bobbi.

When challenged about her business, Anne answers that Bobbi is her concern and states her purpose plainly: she has come to take Bobbi home. She does not disguise her determination or offer a less ambitious reason for appearing. Her insistence exposes the core of her visit: she understands the journey as an intervention in her sister’s life, one she believes she has the right and power to carry out.

Sisterly Attachment and Confrontation

Anne’s intention is protective in its own terms, but the relationship has a history of resentment. In their confrontation, she accuses Bobbi of having mistreated her and the rest of the family over the years. Bobbi answers by invoking that history rather than accepting Anne’s authority. The exchange makes their bond neither a simple reunion nor a straightforward rescue: Anne’s demand that Bobbi return home is inseparable from old grievances and a long-standing struggle over who gets to define what is best for the family.

Bobbi’s response turns the encounter into a revelation. Anne wants to run from the strange place and the experience of having been left fainting beside the road, but she sees her younger sister after Bobbi removes her robe. Bobbi’s altered appearance and the visible evidence of her nonhuman transformation make the danger immediate. Anne’s first impulse is flight; what she has seen, however, cannot be reconciled with the familiar sister she came to collect. Her attempted rescue has brought her face to face with the reason Bobbi’s return is no longer an ordinary family matter.

Imprisonment and Final Resistance

Later, Gard finds Anne, Bobbi, Ev Hillman, and Peter confined in dismantled shower cabinets in the shed. Anne is alive, but a thick cable extends from her forehead, linking her to the apparatus. The discovery transforms her from an arriving relative with a personal claim on Bobbi into one of the living beings caught in the machinery of the crisis. Her presence there also reveals the cost of Bobbi’s entanglement: the people and animal around her have become part of the system that sustains the unfolding events.

Even while trapped, Anne retains a forceful presence. When Gard hesitates over Ev, Anne opens her eyes, and her expression makes him understand the depth of her hostility and the reason Bobbi had fled from her. Anne’s hatred remains active even in agony; she urges Gard to take action and offers to run the mechanism herself. At the same time, her furious mental warning tells him to get down before another person loses his head. These actions show that imprisonment has not made her passive: she continues to command, warn, and resist, even as the apparatus and the violence around it close in.

During the climax, Anne’s mental defiance continues as the light and hum of the machinery intensify. Then a brilliant green flare passes through the device, which settles back into its former drone. Anne’s head slumps into the liquid, and the screen displays the command “DESTROY.” When the computer screen later implodes and the fire reaches the cabinets, the green fluid from Ev’s confinement produces deadly steam. Ev’s body is washed out first, Peter’s follows, and Anne comes last, her hands still clenched. Her death is the final physical consequence of the system that had held her alive and connected to it.

Character and Narrative Significance

Anne’s trajectory reverses the ordinary shape of a homecoming. She enters the story believing that determination and family authority can bring Bobbi back; instead, she crosses into a town where familiar relationships and bodies have been transformed by forces beyond her control. The certainty that makes her arrival purposeful also makes her insist on entering a danger she does not yet understand.

Her attachment to Bobbi is real, but it is expressed through insistence, accusation, and an attempt to decide the younger woman’s future for her. The novel lets that family conflict collide with a more extreme crisis: Anne must confront what Bobbi has become, then becomes physically bound to the machinery surrounding her. Her final resistance preserves the force of her personality within that confinement, while her death underscores how little personal resolve can protect someone once the crisis has converted living beings into components of its operation.