Sublime

A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

This is identifying what the protagonist stands to lose if he doesn’t take part in the story.

Hitchcockian protagonist,

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

In an archetypally structured story, the qualities a character displays in pursuit of their goal will be the ones that sabotage their ability to achieve it,

The principal, Bruce Winterslow,

It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout.