Thanks for all your comments. Jon and June, there will be no sequel to this; though my take on the story is that Suter and Helen, despite the age difference, will indeed end up together. Both of them are damaged, but their respective problems are complementary, so a healing partnership is on the cards. Not that I think Suter would fit in very well with people like Goddard!
Fledchen and ShortNCuddlyAm, he was never really serious about shooting all the villagers. He is essentially a civilized and peaceful guy. jj2me is right -- what worried him most, at first, was the prospect of losing his house. Most of his efforts were expended in making sure that didn't happen. Once the episode at the hospital was over, he was planning just to go home and leave the villagers to their fate. But underneath all this selfishness something else was at work: his social sense. That's what the book is about, the conflict we each feel between needing both personal freedom and a place in society. Hence his feelings for and about Muriel -- he was wracked by guilt for ignoring her plea.
lilac_jive, the book would have burned, and just as well, perhaps: it was time to make a fresh start.
=X= and BOb, one of the technical problems involved in writing a novel is to get the reader to identify with, or at least understand, the characters. The only way to do that is to provide background info, but this bogs down the action. It's a bit chicken-and-egg: action without background is uninteresting, but so is background without action. I tried to make the first chapter as arresting as possible and to make the reader sufficiently curious about Suter (and the whole set-up) that he/she would be able to accept the heavy background in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 was necessary because Bex is such an unusual and horrible creature that he needs careful explanation. Without that, the horror of what had befallen the village would have been less interesting to the reader in the chapters that follow. I was aware of this, and also the overloading of detail in Philip Davies's musings about the plague, but I hoped and thought the reader would forgive it. Plainly, in some cases, I was wrong!
And BOb, Bex really did go out of his mind at the end. That's what can happen when you start playing around with the occult -- look at the example of his loathsome hero,
Aleister Crowley.