Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook

Peter is the book’s primary antagonist. Although he is initially portrayed as being Jamie’s eternal friend and companion, as well as the reason that all of the boys have come to the island, he is soon revealed to be a petulant, destructive, vengeful child who does not care about any lost boys who fail to obey his every whim. In this, he is dramatically different from the original version of the character. While Peter Pan is typically portrayed in adaptations as an adventure-loving and carefree yet inherently kind boy, Henry takes a very different approach by transforming the titular character of Barrie’s classic tale into a narcissistic monster. In Lost Boy, Peter’s love of fun is taken to a violent extreme, for he does not view the other boys as being real people. Instead, he sees them only as toys to be used and discarded when they are no longer fun. Their often violent deaths do not bother Peter at all, and he frequently puts them in extreme danger just to satisfy his desire for adventure and his inherent bloodlust. 

Before the events of the book, Peter’s cruelty was outweighed by his ability to make the boys feel special, especially Jamie. Because Jamie was the first boy that Peter ever brought to the island, he has a special place at Peter’s side, and Peter makes special efforts to ensure that Jamie feels unique and important. However, this is merely a tactic to manipulate Jamie and the other boys into loving him. Peter will do anything to remain the hero of everyone’s story, including murdering children and forcing Jamie to become a pirate. His personality in this story lends a new and sinister subtext to the boisterous ego that the original Peter Pan displays in Barrie’s works.

As Jamie long suspects, Peter is not a normal boy. He was born from the island itself and has no real parents: another departure from the canonical Peter Pan. Henry’s Peter needs blood sacrifices from the other boys in order to remain young and healthy forever. As a result, he is locked forever in a childish state that he can never grow out of. His violence and cruelty are portrayed as the result of his childish inability to see the world as it truly is. At the end of the book, Peter’s inability to let Jamie go manifests itself in the most extreme way. By refusing to let Jamie leave the island, Peter forces his transformation into Captain Hook, the famous antagonist of Peter Pan. Thus, Peter essentially creates Captain Hook as he has created everything on the island, forcing Jamie to be a playmate for him for the rest of time.

Charlie is the youngest of Peter’s boys. He is only five years old, and he has recently arrived from the Other Place. He has soft blond hair, and several characters note that he looks like a little duckling. Unlike most of the boys, Charlie comes from a loving family. He has a brother and parents who will miss him in his absence. Charlie is closest with Jamie, who takes care of him. Instead of being frightened by Jamie’s violence, Charlie sees it as evidence that Jamie will always be able to protect him. 

Later, Charlie briefly becomes enamored of Peter, though the relationship between them is false. Peter only befriends Charlie to charm him into trusting him, thereby giving Peter the opportunity to kill him. Peter’s vengeful attitude against Charlie stems from his jealousy over Jamie’s devotion to the young boy. By the end of the story, Charlie is more articulate and more self-aware than he was at the beginning, but he is still very young and naive. However, Charlie is one of the only characters to survive, eventually joining Jamie and Nod on the pirate ship.

Sal is one of the “boys” that Peter brings from the Other Place halfway through the book. However, after a battle with the pirates, Sal is wounded, and when the boys treat the wound, they discover that Sal is really a girl in disguise. In developing Sal’s character, Henry utilizes stereotypes of traditional “femininity,” for she uses Sal’s kindness and concern for Charlie to foreshadow the revelation of her true gender. Although this characterization reflects greatly oversimplified stereotypes of the behaviors of young boys and girls, Henry employs this coding as a convenient shorthand to set Sal apart from the other boys, who care mainly for adventure, violence, and fun. 

Sal is also Jamie’s love interest and is one of the reasons that he starts to grow up at an accelerated rate. Jamie’s love for Peter has been fading since long before Sal’s arrival. When Jamie envisions an adult future with Sal in which they attain adulthood, get married, and adopt the other boys as their children, he is finally able to abandon his childish connection to Peter and embrace the process of growing up. Jamie’s romantic feelings are therefore essential to becoming an adult, and Sal represents the conduit to this transformation. Her role in this process is made even clearer with Peter’s extreme anger at discovering that he has accidentally brought a girl to the island; Peter insists that no girls are allowed, and this rule implies that he knows that the presence of girls might cause the boys to turn away from him and pursue adulthood. Sal therefore represents growing up for Jamie, as well as Nod, who also has a crush on her. Both Jamie and Nod are forever barred from this experience, as Sal is ultimately killed by the crocodile and Jamie is trapped on the island. Thus, the narrative positions loving and marrying women as the mark of real adulthood for the lost boys, and while this construct of adulthood is a particularly narrow and exclusionary one, it nonetheless dovetails with the source material’s equally simplistic portrayal of the concept of eternal childhood.

Nod and Fog are twin brothers who live on the island with Peter, Jamie, and the other boys. They are identical twins, and Jamie cannot always tell them apart. They love to fight each other over the smallest disagreements, sometimes injuring each other quite badly unless Jamie separates them. Because of their love of fighting, they are enthusiastic participants in many of Peter’s schemes, especially in the early part of the story. Eventually, they become less interested in following Peter, like all the boys do. When Fog is killed, Nod experiences a major character shift. He realizes that Peter does not care that his brother is dead. Grieving for the first time since he arrived on the island, he becomes like Jamie and starts to age quickly. He attributes this to Fog’s death, realizing that the trauma of losing his twin has made him grow up at last. Like Jamie and Charlie, Nod survives the narrative and joins the pirate crew.

Nip is a new boy who wants to be Peter’s favorite. He hates Jamie because he envies the close bond that Jamie and Peter share. All of the boys are violent, but Nip is especially brutal. He is also the boy who suffers the greatest injuries. Over the course of the narrative, Del throws hot coals in his eyes, while Jamie beats him, kicking his ribs and breaking his cheekbone. Nip is also nearly hanged, and he finally meets his end when Jamie brutally caves his head in with a rock. Even before the day of his death, Nip is perpetually on the outside of the boys’ warped community. Nobody likes him, and he responds to most attempts at conversation with insults. Significantly, Nip is the first boy to realize that an alliance with the pirates might be a beneficial arrangement. Although everyone thinks that Nip was wrong to ally himself with the pirates, Jamie, Nod, and Charlie eventually follow in his footsteps at the end of the story. Thus, although he is positioned as an antagonist, Nip actually has a canny understanding of the situation in which he finds himself.