51 pages • 1 hour read
Jeneva RoseHome Is Where the Bodies Are
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Drugs
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the novel’s treatment of drug addiction and death by suicide.
Throughout the novel, Nicole’s addiction symbolizes her unresolved trauma. This link is made explicit when the roots of her drug use are revealed: Nicole was in a car crash while searching for her missing father, and she became addicted to the painkillers prescribed to her afterward. Beth opines Nicole’s attempts at getting sober, and the link between Nicole’s drug use and her father’s disappearance hint that sobriety will evade Nicole until she resolves her trauma.
With this, Nicole’s drug cravings symbolize her craving for the truth. Throughout the novel, she is equally motivated by her desire to solve the mystery of Emma’s death and managing her addiction. Despite her siblings’ stigmatizing behavior, Nicole’s drug use or cravings coincide with new revelations in the case. When she is receiving methadone treatment and Beth suspects that she’s buying drugs, she is actually receiving Emma’s case file from Casey. While she steals Beth’s lockbox key hoping to find valuables to use to buy drugs, she finds Laura’s confession instead. Armed with this vital information, she saves her sister’s life. With the truth out in the open, Nicole finally resolves her trauma surrounding her father’s disappearance and, in the process, is finally able to overcome her drug addiction. Thus, while drugs symbolize unresolved trauma in the novel, sobriety represents healing and emotional health.
Graves
The title Home Is Where the Bodies Are suggests a preoccupation with graves. Graves usually symbolize finality and the closure of life, but the novel also fuses them with the theme of The Cost of Keeping Secrets. The old saying, “I’ll take those secrets to the grave,” suggests the desire to bury truths that shouldn’t be revealed. The novel’s characters do precisely that: Brian, Michael, and Laura hide bodies in a secret backyard cemetery in the hopes of burying unpleasant truths. Brian buries Emma and Charles, concealing their deaths from the community to avoid scandal. He will also fill a grave in the same cemetery because Laura wishes to avoid police scrutiny directed at her son. Laura belatedly realizes the folly of thinking that the past will stay buried. She writes, “I know Brian and I didn’t do the right thing on the night of June 15, 1999. We buried a truth that wasn’t ours to bury. And I’ve hated myself ever since” (279).
However, graves are an incomplete method for concealing evidence; a body decays, but it does not disappear. As such, the graves of Michael’s victims symbolize the fact that these secrets cannot be kept forever. When Beth exhumes the bodies, she also reveals Michael’s secret. Significantly, Laura is the only dead person in the novel who doesn’t get buried. She chooses to be cremated and have her ashes scattered instead, paralleling her decision to reveal the truth in her posthumous confession.
Physical Evidence
As is typical of a mystery novel, the plot progresses as the characters find clues. Rose creates a distinction in the text between physical and digital evidence, using physical documentation like videotapes, diaries, and papers in a safety deposit box to represent the truth. The novel is set in motion due to the evidence of Emma’s dead body on a videotape, and later tapes recorded by Laura provide clear insights into the changed family dynamic afterward. Her journal entries also provide vital clues. Even though pages are torn out of the diary, the value of written testimony is such that the sisters can piece things together around these missing pages. Likewise, Casey’s case files create new leads. Most obviously, Laura’s written confession, kept safe in a physical safety deposit box, reveals the whole conspiracy.
By contrast, technology is used to symbolize deceit. Michael, the villain, works in tech, aligning computer technology with his ill intent. He uses email to impersonate his dead father, then creates a fake IP address to trick his sisters and lead them toward a red herring.
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By Jeneva Rose
