Cathy Ames burns her parents

The narrator argues that psychic monsters are born as surely as physical ones, then introduces Cathy Ames of a Massachusetts tannery town: heart-shaped face, golden hair, tiny lobeless ears, and a gift for lies that stay close enough to the truth. At ten she is found in the carriage house with two boys, her wrists roped; the boys are whipped raw and sent to a house of correction. At fourteen she quietly destroys James Grew, the failed divinity student who teaches Latin; he begs at her father's door at midnight and shoots himself before the altar, and by next day the town is repeating Cathy's rumour that he had been in trouble in Boston. At sixteen she refuses school, is whipped by her father, and turns model daughter — oiling hinges, learning the safe combination, filling a jelly jar with a pullet's blood. The house burns at three in the morning with her parents inside, the keys gone from both locks and the tannery safe emptied.

The essay on monsters is placed first so that everything after it reads as evidence rather than accusation. Each episode is built to be deniable — a rope, a suicide with no letter, a fire — and the reader is handed the domestic details the town never assembles: the oiled hinges, the memorised combination, the jar of chicken blood.