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Hello, and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of August.

I'm Katie Waldman, Slate's Words Correspondent, and I'm joined in the DC studio today by

Culture Editor Dan Coise.

Hello, how are you doing?

I'm good.

And calling in from what I thought was some far-flung European locale, but actually turns out to be Long Island, we are thrilled to have writer and critic Megan O'Rourke. Hey, Megan.

Hi, yes, I'm just back in the States. I'm very happy to be here. Well, today we'll be discussing Harper-Leese ghost at Watchmen. And as always, we'll be looking closely at plot and language and characters. So if there's anything you don't want spoiled about this book, please go read a Watchman and then come back.

We will be here.

All right.

Before we dig in, maybe you guys want to help me briefly reconstruct the plot, perhaps in case listeners have forgotten the precise order in which the prosy ideological interminable conversations unfolds.

So, sorry.

Just to get this off the bat.

Go set of watchmen, we are pleasantly reunited with Jean Louise, otherwise known as Scout, from To Kill a Mockingbird.

She's come back home to Make Home Alabama to visit her father, who is ailing from arthritis,

and in his usual silent stoic style, won't really talk about it, but she comes home to see him.

And basically what follows is this long and painful process of disillusionment

as she realizes that this man who she thought was a moral load star is actually a bigot.

And that the other people in her life that she thought were sort of the simplistic

...