The uncanny is also, as Hugh Haughton puts it, "a survival from the abandoned culture of our own childhood, bearing the Gothic signature of our own earliest terrors and desires." At one point, while being led by a young local boy through nighttime village streets to meet the chieftain who will lead them into Afghanistan, Skelly finds that a random series of images from his own past spring to mind: a wizened old man looks like a fairytale sorcerer; the clang of a gunsmith's hammer calls to mind the "Elves and Dwarves" of fairytales; his mute guide calls up an unbidden biblical verse—"And the children shall lead them"; and the camp is so eerie that Skelly expects at any moment to see "a headless horseman gallop past" (205–7).

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 347