Hal and Gately converged in some ways near the end. Both end up attending Ennet house meetings, and are connected to Joelle, and have a dangerous addiction to drugs, but there's more....

I feel like we a got a lot of horizontal or reposed imagery near the end, especially with the two of them. There was the scene where Hal was lying in his room and can't get up (902), and the scene with Gately falling onto the floor when he's really drugged up (938), Gately being stuck in the hospital bed, and of course the end, with Gately lying on the cold sand at the beach. All of these reposed positions kept evoking a death/corpse image for me.

I thought one of the best scenes in the book thus far was the enormously funny one where all the Ennett House patients are cheering on Gately as he is kicking the butts of the Nucks. He is throwing punches, kicking, kneeing these men (even through the pain of having been shot in the shoulder), in a total adrenaline rush, and everybody is crowded around watching. I loved the detail. Joelle was screaming something unintelligible from the window (that was not her room!), Ken Eredy was holding his keys in the air, Lentz was either hiding behind the car or Gately, and all the cars were idling in an awkward U turn in the street.