History Literature / GoatDance

* AdultFear: Clare Cammack, after experiencing a failed marriage [[spoiler: and watching her sister die during a miscarriage,]] must now care for her father alone as he slips away due to Alzheimer's Disease.

* InfantImmortality: Averted with [[spoiler: Lily Cammack's baby that dies in childbirth]] and [[spoiler: Cappie Hartstone's]] children. Played straight with [[spoiler: Teddy Amory]] who survives until the end.

* HeroicAlbino: Torch; the disfigured homeless man and whipping boy for the town's denizens. He serves as Teddy's protector. [[spoiler: He dies causing an explosion that slows down the Eater Of Souls and it's noteworthy that he's one of the few characters killed off in the novel who doesn't return as undead.]]

* AnnoyingLaugh: Lyle - heh-heh! - Boydston, and it gets taken [[UpToEleven up to eleven-heh-heh!]] after he goes [[LaughingMad laughing mad.]]

** [[spoiler: Warren Whalen's]] audio cassette. Being [[WrongGenreSavvy Wrong Genre Savvy]], he thinks he'll use it to catch either a blackmailer or practical joker in the act. Instead he records [[spoiler: his own gruesome death.]]

* ItsTheOnlyWayToBeSure: [[spoiler: By the end of the novel, both Teddy and Cup have grown [[GenreSavvy Genre Savvy]] enough to know that all of the Goat Dance needs to be destroyed, not just the house. The story ends with them lighting it on fire.]]

* AnxietyDreams: Cup has nightmares about children who are buried in the ground up to their necks where he murders them with a lawnmower, [[spoiler: probably due to the fact that he once killed a boy.]] He parts ways with his therapist over it when the latter writes the lawnmower off as being symbolic of [[AllPsychologyIsFreudian Cup's phallus.]] It turns out [[spoiler: the therapist [[FreudWasRight is right.]]]]

* LostLenore: Prescott Nagle never remarried following the death of his wife Cassie forty years earlier. Her suitor, Gower Lowery never got over it either. The Eater Of Souls takes advantage of this in its dealings with both of them.

* ZombieApocalypse: [[spoiler: Based on what happens in Pontefract, it's likely that the Goatman's emergence into our world would cause this.]]

* IHaveManyNames: The Goat Dance entity has gone by a variety of epithets throughout the centuries. Eater Of Souls, Mother Of Nightmares, and Goatman are the most popular. According to Virginia Houston, (speaking through Teddy Amory,) its true name is unpronounceable to humans.

* LostLenore: Prescott Nagle never remarried following the death of his wife Cassie forty years earlier. Her suitor, Gowry Lowery never got over it either. The Eater Of Souls takes advantage of this in its dealings with both of them.

* TheCanKickedHim: [[spoiler: Howie Mccormick]] is in the bathroom recovering from throwing up when an assailant enters behind him and drowns him in the toilet.
** A teenaged trespasser in the Marlowe-Houston House stops to use the floor toilet in the basement and is promptly yanked down it to his death.