Judith Thompson’s gift is to enter into the mind, soul and bod y of her characters: she has said th at she ge ts “into their blood” (Knowles 7). Her cha racters are at the extreme edges of wha t most peop le can comprehend:Theresa the retard ed dou ghnut junkie; Mercy, whose lonelin ess is infinite; Joanne, face to face with her own death; Scarl ett , wh o breathes life int o that deadly phrase, ’di fferently abled’, Carl, the racist skinhead. Terence said “No thing human is alien to me”, and so might Judith Thompson. But she does not make the stranger familia r; she does not expla in or account for her cha rac ters. They are. She does not allow us to assimilate them, translate their ex-eentricity into terms we understand. Nor does she allow us to set them apart from us, hold them at a safe distance, treat them as Other-than-us.