Marhay an nagin tuyaw kan mga kritiko sa nobela urog sa misteryoso kaining tono. An The New York Review of Books inapod ining "eery and tenebrous. It is a ghost story but the narrator does not realise that." Sabi man kan The New York Times an nobelang ini "infinitely ... mysterious", and the inconsistent tone of the narrator, with the graphic imagery in the book combined to create "the absolute emblem of our genius of destruction".