63 pages • 2 hours read
Alex MichaelidesThe Fury
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Act 4, Chapter 1 Summary
Elliot tells the reader that after he developed his plan, he explained it to Lana. Back in the past, he tells her that Jason and Kate’s relationship will crack under the pressure of her murder and that she will get her revenge. They decide to stage the shooting and enlist Leo’s help, even though they both doubt his ability to execute the scene. They decide not to tell Agathi and Nikos. Elliot doesn’t share his full plan with her, however.
The night of the murder, Elliot meets Lana at the ruin with a shotgun. He fires it in the air three times while Lana applies fake blood and stage makeup. Elliot wraps Kate’s red shawl around her and then leaves the scene, dropping the shotgun into the rosemary bush. When the others arrive, he follows Leo and is shocked both by the boy’s acting and by how real it all seems. He realizes now that he forgot to consider how unpredictable people can be during a traumatic event.
Act 4, Chapter 2 Summary
Lana follows Agathi, determined to catch her before she ruins the plan. Inside, she climbs the stairs to Agathi’s room but hears Jason and Kate below. She eavesdrops as they look for the guns. Outside, Elliot gives Leo his cue to enter but doesn’t tell him that Elliot moved the guns out of the chest earlier.
Leo acts upset, screaming about Lana’s death. Lana watches from the top of the stairs and realizes that Jason doesn’t care. She runs into the bathroom and vomits.
Act 4, Chapter 3 Summary
When Lana comes out of the bathroom, Agathi is waiting for her. Agathi is angry, but she listens as Lana explains and asks for her help.
Act 4, Chapter 4 Summary
Elliot, Jason, and Nikos search the island. Elliot is annoyed, knowing it is pointless, but Jason wants to search Nikos’s cottage. Elliot leaves them to return to the house, hoping that Lana has managed to placate Agathi.
In the living room, he retrieves one of Jason’s guns from where he hid them in the sofa earlier. Lana comes into the room, and he tells her to go back to the ruin before she’s discovered. Lana tells him that she wants to stop the plan. Elliot hasn’t completed his own plan but pretends to go along with her.
Elliot decides to tell her about his near proposal from so long ago. She says nothing would’ve happened between them, but he insists they had more and asks her to marry him now. Lana laughs and insinuates that she might then die like Barbara West, falling down the stairs. Elliot, shocked and devastated, leaves the room.
Act 4, Chapter 5 Summary
Elliot can’t believe Lana’s cruelty. He goes outside and sees Jason coming back from the search. Nikos stays at his cottage. Elliot tells Jason that Agathi spoke to the police, and they are on their way. Jason goes to the jetty to wait for them while Elliot goes to find Kate. Even though he is angry, he is going to follow through with the plan. He checks to make sure he still has the gun before entering the summerhouse.
Act 4, Chapter 6 Summary
Elliot tells Kate that they are all meeting the police at the jetty. She believes that Nikos killed Lana, but Elliot tells her that Nikos is dead. He says that Jason claims Nikos fell off the cliffs while they were searching. Kate wants to go to the jetty to find Jason, but Elliot tells her that Jason killed Lana. She doesn’t believe him, so he tells her about Jason’s financial troubles, giving her a motive and hoping to sway her.
Kate doesn’t believe that Jason would kill Lana for money, and Elliot points out that Lana was wearing Kate’s red shawl. He posits that Jason killed Lana accidentally, thinking she was Kate. Kate still wants to find Jason, so Elliot gives her his gun for protection.
Act 4, Chapter 7 Summary
Elliot follows Kate down to the jetty. It is strange and thrilling for Elliot to watch the plan he scripted come to life. He wonders if Kate will stick to his plan and use the gun he gave her, but he feels fairly confident in his assessment of Kate’s volatile behavior. He is nervous as he watches his play unfold.
Act 4, Chapter 8 Summary
Kate and Jason are on the jetty alone. He sees the gun in her hand and moves to take it, but she steps back. When his hand trembles, she realizes he is scared. He says he loves her, but his words upset her because she knows he is lying. She asks if he killed Lana, believing Lana was her, as Elliot said. As Jason comes toward her, Kate backs away, pointing the gun at him. He lunges, and she fires several times. Jason falls, bleeding.
Elliot tells the reader that the scene he just described would have been an amazing ending, but real life isn’t like fiction. In reality, the story ended very differently.
Act 4, Chapter 9 Summary
Elliot feels a gun poking into his back. Nikos is behind him with a gun, prodding him toward the jetty, where Kate and Jason are standing, Kate still holding the gun. Elliot thinks Nikos is ruining his plan. On the jetty, he faces Kate, who tells Jason that Elliot said Jason killed Nikos. While Kate and Jason are talking about him, he sees Agathi on the beach and knows that his plan will be exposed.
Kate now believes that Elliot is trying to frame Jason for Lana’s death, which Elliot committed. She points out that Elliot is due to inherit millions after Lana’s death.
Act 4, Chapter 10 Summary
Elliot didn’t anticipate this possibility. He waits for Agathi to expose him, but she doesn’t. When Kate and Jason start talking about shooting him, Elliot decides to tell the truth. He says that Lana’s death is a hoax and asks Agathi to back him up, but she pretends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Jason punches Elliot and breaks his jaw.
Kate and Jason consider setting it up so that it looks like Elliot murdered Lana and then died by suicide. Nikos holds Elliot in place while Jason puts the gun to his temple and tells him to pull the trigger. When he resists, Kate puts her hand over Elliot’s and pulls the trigger. Elliot’s world goes dark.
Act 4 Analysis
Act 4 reveals Elliot’s plan, as he presents it to Lana, which will destroy Jason and Kate’s relationship under the pressure of a murder investigation. However, he once again shows how little concern he has for Lana as a person when he tells the reader that she doesn’t know his whole plan. With this admission, Elliot makes clear that although his plan appears to be with and for Lana, his scheme supersedes the plan they are executing.
Although Lana is a willing participant in the plan, Agathi’s reaction and Jason’s apparent apathy are enough to change her mind. Here, Agathi shows her power and supports her own belief that she is closest to Lana, despite Elliot’s perspective. Lana respects Agathi’s authority and moral compass. Additionally, despite Lana’s awareness of the affair, she isn’t able to handle Jason’s lack of emotion about her apparent death.
Elliot’s habit of Understanding the World Through Story becomes even more pronounced in the text as he watches the scene between Kate and Jason from the woods. It becomes clear that part of the attraction of seeing the world this way and positioning himself as the author of the action allows him to remain at a distance, in the position of observer. Elliot has always been an orchestrator of events and an observer, even in his childhood, with his escapism in the theater and in his altering of his name and life story. He is more comfortable being in control of the action, and in this scene, it is taken to the extreme, as he watches two people he maneuvered into a murderous confrontation, concerned only with whether they will execute his script. Before he offers the outcome, however, he again offers the reader his fantasy of what might have happened, had things gone according to his plan. At the end, however, he returns to the idea that reality is different, once again highlighting the fact that his plan went awry specifically because he didn’t predict all of the possible outcomes and plan for them.
These are the moments when Michaelides breaks from the murder mystery convention—he offers the reader a more predictable version of the convention and then contrasts it with what really happened. He will return to this comparison, and the corresponding discussion of genre, when he subverts the genre conventions and takes the narrative in a different direction. Chapter 9 quickly follows up his idealized version of the scene with the true reality of it, in which he is forced to participate, rather than observe. Suddenly, he is an actor in the play, not the writer.
Act 4 ends with what seems to be Elliot’s death. The scene in which Kate and Jason bully Elliot into pulling the trigger himself echoes the scene from Elliot’s childhood in which the bullies stood around him and forced him to drink rotten milk. The bullies in his childhood were punishing him for the enjoyment and success he experienced in his first theater appearance, and in a way, this scene is Elliot’s punishment for his latest attempt at theater and the enjoyment and success he was experiencing up to this point. This also suggests that the other characters in their group are willing to go to extremes to prove a point, just as Elliot originally intended in his own plan. Elliot believed he was the only one capable of this level of orchestration and manipulation, but in a surprising twist, Elliot’s mind games are matched.
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By Alex Michaelides
