What Ails Seth?
Seth’s psychiatrist has an easy answer for why Seth is oppressed by mood swings and recurring nightmares of a creature in a swamp. But the bleeding scratches on his neck will not be so easily explained away by the Bipolar II diagnosis. Upending his successful life in Atlanta, Seth seeks the answer in his native Sierra Leone. His arrival inadvertently triggers a latent grieving process in his cold mother, Evelyn, who has spent her life exerting her unyielding will over the practice both of memory and of forgetting. Despite courting a mystical experience, undergoing an exorcism, and seeking to excise the frustrations of his childhood by setting up a camp for underprivileged kids, the creature, and its attendant ills, claims more and more of his being. This leaves him to face the prospect of madness, violence and death. As he begins to realize that he will never be free from the creature, he takes the biggest risk of all – yielding to it.
What Makes Someone Suddenly Upend Their Life?
Curiosity lit the spark. It was the initial pinprick of interest in why someone with an objectively successful life, would, for no outwardly apparent reason, seek to abandon what others so fiercely envied. Thus, Seth came into being with all his encumbrances, his inner hauntedness. Having essentially achieved the American dream at a tender age, he quits his well-paying job, breaks up with his lovely girlfriend and puts his house up for sale for reasons he cannot articulate well to anyone. For who would understand what he describes as "The Thing," without deeming him mad.
The first time Seth woke up with blood on his pillow, he knew something had been taken away while he slept. In the bathroom, he examined his neck. Porous welts, all swollen, some showing thin, bloody furrows. Dr. Holland had told him point-blank that he was doing it to himself and he needed to trim his nails down to the quick, told him he might even have to consider sleeping with restraints. It was then that he stopped his visits.