Horns Summary

Not sure where to go, Ig drives to the base of the Old Fair Road Bridge. He recalls his friendship with Lee Tourneau. When Merrin had been alive, the three of them has been inseparable. After Merrin’s murder, Lee slowly and discreetly began to distance himself from Ig until the friendship fully disintegrated. Lee worked for a senator, and his relationship with Ig could have compromised his job prospects. Ig also remembers his courtship with Merrin, and a particularly strange night in the place called the Tree House of the Mind. Ig had convinced himself that it was a hallucination, but Merrin remembered it the same way. Lost in thought, Ig doesn’t notice the police cruiser pulling up behind his car. It is driven by Sturtz, a beefy officer who has delighted in harassing Ig for petty violations since Merrin’s murder. Sturtz’s partner, Posada, joined him and soon the two began confessing their inner thoughts. Posada was a closeted homosexual who harbored a deep-seated attraction to Sturtz. Sturtz was an ardent homophobe who admitted that he wanted to plant evidence in Ig’s car to give him cause to arrest Ig. Testing his powers, Ig first suggests to Posada that he simply make a physical move on Sturtz, and tells him Sturtz must be returning his affections secretly. Next, Ig reinforces Sturtz’s violent anti-gay mentality. Unable to find anything to charge Ig with, the officers let him drive away. As he departs, he can see Posada put his head in his partner’s lap to make his move.

Everyone in the town of Gideon was convinced that Ig’s well-to-do parents had hired a fancy lawyer to get him exonerated of any charges related to Merrin’s death. Ig’s father had enjoyed some brief celebrity for his trumpeting skills. After playing on some of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s recordings, Ig’s father became a teacher at Berklee College of Music. Ig’s older brother Terry, followed in his father’s footsteps musically while Ig was unable...

Ig had originally gone upstairs to look for any stuff that was his and take it with him. When he gets to his room, the first thing that he finds is his trumpet case. Long after it had been clear that asthma would keep Ig from playing like his father and brother, Ig used to continue practicing silently in his room. He didn’t dare use his full breath or else he’d risk passing out from oxygen deprivation. Ig remembers all of this bitterly and empties the trumpet case to use it as a makeshift suitcase. He pulls out the foam casing for the trumpet to maximize the space. He throws in some clothes and a passport, which he finds inside of a bible. He also notices the bible contains an attempt at the Morse code, which he intended to...

Ig first met Merrin when he was fifteen years old, in church during one of Father Mould’s sermons. As he and his family sit listening, Ig feels a light flashing in the corner of his eyes. When it persists, he finds that the light is coming from across the aisle. A pretty, redheaded girl is using the cross necklace she is wearing to flash light in his eyes. Ig notices a pattern to it and Ig’s father, Derrick, suggests she might be using Morse code. Ig and the redhead continued to exchange flirtatious glances until the girl’s necklace accidentally breaks. Another teenage boy standing directly behind her attempts to fix it, but the girl pulls away from him. The boy is obviously interested in her, but her father makes himself a...

While Ig is underwater he feels like he’s in another world. He is sure that he’s either dead or dying and feels there are souls everywhere but that he is too far away from God. Before he knows it, he is dragged upwards and laid on the beach. Someone slaps him soundly on the back and coughs up a lot of river water. Ig initially assumes his brother is the one who saved him, but is surprised to find out it was Lee. Ig’s face is throbbing with pain and blood is running down his face; he has broken his nose. Terry, Eric, and the others make their way down to the riverbed and Terry also thanks Lee. Lee tries desperately to downplay his bravery, but Terry and Ig want to invite him over to the house to tell their parents that he...

Ig goes to church the following week feeling incredibly nervous. He is anxious to see the redheaded girl and is also nervous about what Lee will do. As much as he feels indebted to Lee, he wants to be the one to give the necklace back to the girl. Ig spots Lee in church and is shocked to find him wearing the necklace. He and Lee both search the sanctuary but do not see the girl. Lee and Ig exchange silent glances wondering where the girl went. After the service is over, Ig notices some of the older women who were seated with the redheaded girl last week. He finds out her name is Merrin, and her family is moving to town; she most likely will be in church next week. Ig is excited, but unsure of what to tell Lee (or if he should tell...

Lydia takes her sons to the barber shop to get haircuts. While Lydia is providing detailed instructions to the barber for Terry’s haircut, Ig sees Glenna outside. Glenna writes suggestively in the condensation on the window, and Ig goes out to see her. Ig is surprised to find out that Glenna knows a lot about his friendship with Lee. Glenna is especially interested in the cross and who it belongs to; she seems aware that Lee might be infatuated with this mysterious girl in church. Glenna laughs at the fact that Ig thinks Lee is poor; she tells him he lives in Harmon Gates, an upper-middle class subdivision. He also hints that Lee’s subscription charity may not be everything it seems. Glenna tells Ig that Lee is obsessed with...

The girl, whose name he learned was Merrin Williams, is indeed in church the next day. Ig gets her attention using the cross to reflect the sun in her eyes, just as she did the first Sunday they met. Once he has her attention, Ig and Merrin take turns avoiding the other’s glances. If one stares, the other tries to appear fully invested in the church service. At the end of the service, Merrin seems to be on the verge of getting away but gestures covertly to a quiet corner of the church. Feigning a need to go to the bathroom, Ig waits for her at the appointed place. When she finally returns, he gives her the necklace back. He admits that Lee fixed it, and tells her Lee was the boy who tried to help her when it first broke. Merrin...

In the present day, Ig speeds away from his parents’ house wondering what damage he did to his grandmother or if he even killed her. He thinks it would be ironic if he killed the miserable Vera, so that he could finally become the killer everyone in Gideon thinks he is.

Wanting to be alone, he heads to the Pit, the bar he and Merrin visited the night she was murdered. As he pulls into the driveway of the bar, he remembers that night. Ig had been away for three weeks training for an Amnesty International job in London. He was set to fly out early the next morning, so this would be his last night with Merrin before a long separation. She seems distant when he first arrives, barely acknowledging his kiss. Unexpectedly,...

Ig drives up to the senator’s office where Lee worked. After Lee’s cherry bomb accident, he had turned his life around. He had found religion and regularly spoke at church and civic gatherings about his dark past and how God had helped him turn it around. Lee originally planned a career as a minister but dropped out when his mother became gravely ill. After she died, he got a bachelor’s degree and began to volunteer for the senator. He soon became one of the most important members of the team, helping him get re-elected. Ig recalled one fight between Merrin and Lee that came about when Lee helped the senator with some anti-abortion action. Lee took the criticism in stride and Merrin eventually dropped the subject. After...

For a moment after he wakes the next morning, Ig hoped that everything that had happened had been a horrible dream. When he realizes he still had horns and had slept in the furnace room of the abandoned foundry, he knew it wasn’t a dream. He hears cries from outside and starts to run, grabbing a pitchfork for protection. Three boys are tormenting a fourth, who has been stripped to his underwear. The leader of the group has pinned the boy down and burned his chest with a cigarette. One of the other two boys taunts him with a snake. The boys cut off the head of the snake with a pair of garden shears and then demand that the pinned boy suck the blood out of it. Ig, wielding the pitchfork, finally interrupts the torture session and...

Ig, figuring that his family is out visiting Vera at the hospital, decides to go to their house after his fight with Eric. He initially thinks the house is empty, but finds his brother sleeping fitfully in his bed. Ig grabs his brother’s arm to wake him and is bombarded with the truth of the night Merrin died. After Ig had gone to meet Merrin at the Pit, Lee and Terry go to an outdoor party. Riding in Lee’s car later, Terry is very high and sick feeling. Lee pulls the car up to the Pit and they see Merrin standing in the rain. She gets in and Terry offers her his jacket. She is upset about the break-up and Terry is at a loss about how to comfort her. Merrin is also fairly inebriated and asks Lee to pull over so she can be sick....

After speaking to the snakes, Ig sleeps again. His awoken by Lee, who attacks him with a wrench. Ig tries to escape, but the multiple blows and kicks leave him barely conscious. He is bleeding and several of his teeth have been knocked out. Lee drags him outside toward Evel Knievel hill. Lee tells Ig that no one at the senator’s office can remember Ig being there. In addition, Eric can’t remember the attack that left his face burned. Lee also mentions the distorted image of Ig on the surveillance video, but cannot figure out what it all means. Using his last bit of strength, Ig lunges at Lee. He attempts to strangle Lee and rips off Merrin’s cross necklace. Lee regains the upper hand and begins confessing, which confirms...

For the last few weeks of his her life, Lee tortures his mother. She is dying of kidney failure and suffers from dementia. To make her more uncomfortable and difficult to breathe, Lee turns off the air conditioner. It’s so hot that he walks around the house naked because it’s the only way he can stand the heat. He also feeds her salt water or drinks something cool right in front of her. When she has an accident in the bed, he frequently lets her sit in it. When his mother finally dies, Merrin is the first person Lee calls. Lee still harbors feelings for Merrin even after all her time with Ig. He thinks that she feels the same way, but feels duty-bound to Ig. Lee analyzes her every word and action and frequently sees what he...

When Lee arrives, he finds Merrin is not alone. Her mouthy roommate talks incessantly into her cell phone and occasionally inserts herself into Merrin and Lee’s conversation. Merrin begins to question Lee about Ig, wondering if he is interested in other women. Lee takes the opportunity to make it sounds like Ig looks at other women all the time. Merrin wonders if they will get married and whether he’ll philander out of boredom. She even admits that they have named their two unborn children. She also confides that one of her professors offered to set her up as his mistress in an apartment, which Lee is disgusted by. As they finish chatting, Lee notices that Merrin doesn’t look well. When he asks her about it, she brushes it...

When Lee’s mother was near death, her mind was mostly gone and her speech nonsense. One day near the end, however, she regains her faculties briefly. Early in the morning, Lee awakens to the sounds of movement from the other room. He makes his way to his mother’s bedroom and finds her phone off the hook. She is pulling at the cord in an unsuccessful attempt to pull the receiver up off the floor. When Lee asks her what she’s doing, she tells him she is making a call but will not say whom she is calling. She asks Lee why he keeps torturing her, even though she already knows the answer: he is testing his own power over the world around him. Then she tells Lee that he may have a handsome exterior, but he is empty on the inside....

When he comes to, Lee does not immediately see the cat. Instead, he gazes up at the sky: it looks like the moon might fall. In fact, the sky seemed to wave like a piece of fabric. Using his fingers, Lee reaches up and put the moon back in place. Lee notices he had grown much, much larger. He is no longer lying in the cornfield; he is up in the sky looking down on the town. He sees his father driving home with some beer as his passenger; Lee imagines driving him off the road with the flick of one of his fingers. He sees his houses and the houses around him and wonders what it would be like to simply wipe them all away with his hands. Looking down into the cornfield, Lee spots the cat. Lee is angry at the cat for tricking him, for...

The night of the murder, Lee is on edge. With Terry high and half out of it, he pulls up to The Pit hoping to see Merrin. When he sees her standing in the rain, he is relieved and ogles her in her wet clothes. When she gets in, he analyzes everything she says or does looking for signals. He is especially mad that Terry is with them and wishes he had taken him home before picking Merrin up. When Terry offers her his jacket, Lee’s inherent dislike of Terry intensifies. He still remembers Terry calling him a coward the first time they met, when Lee was trying to muster up the courage to mountain board down Evel Knievel hill. Now, Lee thinks Terry is already making the move on his brother’s ex-girlfriend less than an hour after...

When Ig catches a look at his own reflection in the water by the foundry, he hardly recognizes himself. His skin is red, but smooth and unblemished. His head is totally bald, as if cleanly shaven, but his goatee seems to have survived the fire. Ig cannot stop thinking about Merrin’s death and the terrible things that Lee did to her. He had seen it all when he had touched Lee and the images still haunt him. Taking his pitchfork, Ig searches for clothes on the grounds by the foundry and finds a few articles. He puts on short lace skirt, and uses a sock to cover his genitals. He completes the outfit with a dark trench coat, and heads down the river. On his way out, he spies Merrin’s necklace and puts it on. The police have...

Sitting in his room in the chimney, Ig reads a letter written to him by Merrin. He found it in the envelope with her mammogram results and other medical paperwork. The entire note is written in Morse code so it takes a long time for him to translate it. In the letter, she tells him that this is for him to read after she’s dead, although she’s not sure she wants him to see it even then. She has the form of cancer that her sister had. Over the course of months it takes her to write the Morse-code goodbye letter, the cancer metastasizes and spreads quickly. She has already decided that she is going to commit suicide because she doesn’t want to turn into the monster her sister became at the end of her life. Regan had a fiancé...

As Ig prepares for his fateful meeting with Lee, a car pulls into the Foundry lot much earlier than expected. At first, he worries that Lee was on the road when he called him, but then he sees that it’s Terry’s rental car. Ig is surprised to see Terry because he had used his mind control to tell him to go back to Hollywood. Ig gets in Terry’s car and Terry explains that he quit his job hosting the late night show. He hasn’t enjoyed his work since Merrin’s death. He was driving out of Gideon and toward Massachusetts when he heard a report about the burned car in the river. Away from town, he couldn’t remember why he’d been in such a hurry to leave, so he drove back, stopping at the foundry to see if he could find out...

Ig had laid a trap for Lee in the event that Lee would overtake him in their fight. He had placed one of the snakes in the chimney room with strict orders to strike an intruder. But Ig had forgotten about the trap until Terry started toward the room. Since Glenna’s phone is in there, Terry heads to the room to call Ig an ambulance. Ig tries to scream but finds he has no voice. Terry enters the room and the snake strikes him. Terry grapples with it and the snake gets in several more bites before Terry is able to kill it. Terry starts to lose consciousness and Ig knows he has little time before the venom kills Terry. In excruciating pain, Ig drags himself out of the foundry and sets himself on fire. On his way out, Ig can finally...

Ig follows a trail cut by the fire that leads to a cherry tree, taking Terry’s horn in tow. The tree is surrounded by fire, but Ig walks through it and climbs the tree. As he does so, the first few emergency vehicles make their way onto the foundry grounds. One veteran fireman is sure he could see the shadow of a devil. Ig sees that the treehouse is at the top and it sounds as though there is a wedding celebration inside. He enters and kisses his fiery bride.

A few months later, Terry comes back to Gideon for a visit. He tells the police his version of the story: he came upon Lee and Eric trying to cover up evidence of their murder of Ig and they locked him in the room with the snake and then turned on each other....