Hollis is not writing about bad fathers in the ordinary sense — the cruel or absent or simply distracted man. He is writing about a transmission, a specific inheritance that moves through generations not as intention but as atmosphere. Saturn's shadow is not malice; it is what happens when a man, having received no light himself, becomes the gravitational center around which his son's spirit slowly stops moving. The father who tumbles to his rival, who shuts down the son's one channel of escape — he is not plotting. He is repeating.

Blake's "dark, satanic mills" named industrialism, but the image reaches further than smoke and iron. The mill grinds. It takes what is alive and produces something uniform, useful, extinguished. Hollis sees that same mechanism operative in theology, in political atrocity, in the ordinary household where a boy's hope of masculine companionship is quietly foreclosed. What these structures share is not cruelty exactly — it is the absence of soul, the inability to bear another's aliveness because one's own was tamped out first. Auschwitz did not emerge from nowhere; it emerged from worlds already made iron, where the fires of life had been systematically reduced. The wound travels. That is the Saturnian logic: not destruction for its own sake, but the replication of an interior darkness that mistakes its own dimness for the natural light.