Revenge and Obsession
What This Theme Explores
Revenge and obsession in Everyone Here Is Lying ask how hurt morphs into harm—and how a private grievance can metastasize into public disaster. The novel probes the thin line between righteous outrage and vindictive fixation, showing how the desire to make someone “pay” reshapes motives, identities, and entire communities. It examines how envy, humiliation, and unrequited desire can harden into plans that are colder and more calculated than the initial injury. Most unsettling, it reveals how adults and children alike can be seduced by the false promise that retaliation will restore control.
How It Develops
At the outset (Chapters 1–15 in Chapters 1-15), revenge appears small-scale and impulsive. After her father, William Wooler, hits her, Avery Wooler seeks to make him suffer by vanishing—a childish but pointed act that leverages fear as payback. When she hides at Marion Cooke’s house, the game of personal tit for tat quietly becomes a town-wide crisis. Simultaneously, Al Blanchard’s simmering fixation on his wife’s affair is seeded in the background, suggesting a more adult, more corrosive form of obsession taking root.
In the middle movement (Chapters 16–40 in Chapters 16-40), revenge turns premeditated. Marion’s unrequited desire for William curdles into jealousy of Nora Blanchard, and she seizes Avery’s disappearance to engineer a plot that punishes both her rivals. By imprisoning Avery and redirecting suspicion onto Nora’s son, Ryan, Marion weaponizes the town’s fear, the police tip line, and even maternal guilt. In parallel, Al’s watchfulness swells into ritualized surveillance, transforming wounded pride into a routine of self-torment and imagined retaliation.
By the climax (Chapters 41–56 in Chapters 41-56), the machinery of revenge is fully exposed. Marion’s scheme—anonymous calls, false leads, and a captive child—reveals obsession as both motive and method. Avery answers betrayal with her own retaliatory push down the stairs, echoing the novel’s opening slap with a final, mirrored act of violence. Even where violence remains fantasized, as with Al’s imagined murder of Nora, the story shows how obsession corrodes from the inside out, making cruelty feel reasonable.
Key Examples
Revenge and obsession move from impulse to strategy, from private fixation to public harm. These moments show how the desire to hurt back reorganizes choices, stories, and identities.
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Avery’s initial revenge. After William hits her, Avery hides to make him “sorry”—a child’s blunt calculus that weaponizes absence and panic. Her small act detonates the town’s equilibrium and gives larger, darker obsessions the cover they need to flourish.
“I wanted him to be sorry,” Avery complains. “I wanted him to be blamed!” — Chapter 35
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Marion’s obsession becomes vengeance. Seeing William with Nora converts longing into fury, and Avery’s arrival gives Marion the lever she needs. By imprisoning Avery and framing Ryan, she turns private jealousy into a public narrative that inflicts maximum pain on her perceived rivals.
But there was more. Because she’d seen Ryan Blanchard drive down the street that day, just before Avery turned up at her back door. And she knew she could do something that would rip Nora’s heart right out of her chest. — Chapter 35
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Al’s voyeuristic fixation. Rather than confront his wife, Al ritualizes his hurt—watching, timing, rehearsing humiliation—until surveillance itself becomes a coping mechanism. The routine both feeds and contains his desire for payback, showing obsession as a habit of mind that sustains pain.
“That’s what I do every Tuesday. I told work that I have an appointment every Tuesday afternoon at three, and I don’t go back.” He adds, his voice breaking, “And then I go home and pretend I’ve been at work.” — Chapter 26
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Al’s dark fantasies. Al imagines killing Nora, dramatizing how betrayal can curdle into violent ideation even without action. The fantasy exposes obsession’s endgame: the illusion that annihilating the source of pain will restore dignity or control.
What he’d like to do is go home and put his large hands around Nora’s long, lovely throat, and squeeze until she’s gone. He imagines it, her eyes staring wildly back at him, pleading, as he snuffs the life out of her. — Chapter 43
Character Connections
Marion Cooke channels obsession into architecture: locks, lies, and tip-line scripts. Her revenge is less an outburst than a system—cold, patient, and plausibly deniable—which reveals how obsession prefers distance and control to confrontation. By using Avery as leverage and Ryan as a scapegoat, she shows revenge’s appetite for collateral damage.
Avery Wooler proves that the thirst for payback is not exclusively adult. Her desire to punish William initiates the plot, and her final shove answers manipulation with counter-violence. The arc suggests how quickly a victim of harm can adopt the logic of retaliation—and how easily that logic escalates.
Al Blanchard embodies obsession’s quiet corrosiveness. His refusal to confront Nora keeps him trapped in a loop of surveillance and fantasy, where imagined revenge both soothes and inflames his wounded pride. He demonstrates how obsession can feel like control even as it hollows a person out.
Nora Blanchard becomes both target and screen for others’ vendettas. Marion tries to annihilate her through her child, and Al half-secretly savors her suffering as “deserved.” Nora’s fear of cosmic punishment underscores the theme’s moral undertow: when people expect retribution, they see it everywhere.
William Wooler is the fulcrum of overlapping obsessions. His affair triggers Al’s fixation and Marion’s jealousy, while his slap makes him the object of Avery’s revenge. The novel positions him as the point where private sins attract public consequences, enabling others’ vendettas to take shape.
Symbolic Elements
The Breezes Motel functions as a shrine to betrayal, where secrecy feels intimate but breeds surveillance and shame. For Al, returning there weekly turns hurt into ritual, making the site a feeder system for obsession.
Marion’s basement literalizes obsession’s psychology: hidden, airless, and controlled. Avery’s captivity embodies how revenge demands containment—of truths, of people, of conscience—and how that containment becomes its own cruelty.
The anonymous tip line perverts civic trust into a weapon. By allowing Marion to act without immediate accountability, it symbolizes the modern ease of remote harm: revenge delivered at a distance, scrubbed of fingerprints.
Contemporary Relevance
In an age of anonymous reporting, viral outrage, and curated surveillance (both online and off), the novel’s portrait of revenge feels eerily familiar. It captures how jealousy and humiliation can be laundered through systems—platforms, hotlines, rumor mills—so that personal vendettas masquerade as public concern. It also illuminates the seductive psychology of schadenfreude, inviting communities to participate in punishment without reckoning with its collateral damage. The book’s warning is timely: obsession thrives on distance and repetition, and modern life offers both in abundance.
Essential Quote
But there was more. Because she’d seen Ryan Blanchard drive down the street that day, just before Avery turned up at her back door. And she knew she could do something that would rip Nora’s heart right out of her chest. — Chapter 35
This moment distills the theme’s cold calculus: Marion turns private longing and jealousy into a strategy designed for maximum emotional devastation. Revenge here is not a flash of anger but a chosen narrative—who will suffer, how much, and for how long—showing obsession’s shift from feeling to plan.