Love Between Shadows

[mackousko]

Sorry for quite different POV, but for me this is really not a romantic storry. I hope it´s OK.

I still don´t know why they have to kill the people. You´ve said "Elisse" is not a vampire and she doesn´t live of blood. Actually if i remember correct by Mr. Frankenbeans was nothing for her to eat?
Their relationship is very strange. Orson is a pedophile. And Elisse although only "12" is also not new to sexuality. I have thought their are not smart. But now i think their strange behavior is based on the fact that they are mad and also heavy sociopaths . What i also noticed. The other people are nameless for them. Even Mr. Frankenbeans is nameless. Yeah . Even they were nameless to each other until recently. Right? Actually this fits to the serial killer nature, because serial killers are all driven by some sexual deviations and of course are sociopaths.

[sauvin]

For a fact, when I went rooting around for names for the two kids, since it seems like I might be spending some time with them, I was looking for names that don't wander too far away from Oskar and Eli. I wound up rejecting Oscar outright and going with Orson because it's "close enough for government work".

The girl's name was a bit stickier because I wanted something that could be shortened to something that sounds a lot like Eli (given the Anglosphere's penchant for shortening names), but didn't want it to be explicitly masculine. Since the kids are apparently very intimate in all sorts of different ways, she had to be a girl inside and out if she were to remain accessible to me (consistent, that is, with what I'd grown up with). I'd toyed with variations on Elisabeth (and even Erzabet), Aaliyah and others, and wound up running across Elysse. Elisa, wherever you are these days, you're sorta kinda immortal now! - but that name, too, wouldn't have worked because we usually just called her Lisa.

Elysse Deschamps has apparently been around since "before they started printing books", and so presumably knew about Elysian fields, as presumably would others in this unnamed village she grew up in. Had she taken some ribbing because of such a name the way other girls might sometimes have taken ribbing for names like Purity and Prudence and Innocence and suchlike, or names like Angelique - or maybe her name became a bitter joke after having become what she is now?

Seriously, though, the only real point to that whole interchange was just to suggest that she's sensitive about her name - for whatever reason - and to add some small bit to the overall relationship: this girl who can take down meat packers who outmass and outsize her by half an order of magnitude displays humour, patience, restrain, tolerance and tenderness to the (fully?) human boy by resorting to saying "I got a whole tubful of 'don't' for every comment your'e about to make!"

[gkmoberg1]

Thank you for the explanation. I was rooting all over google trying to get an angle on what she was trying to protect.

[sauvin]

Sorry for quite different POV, but for me this is really not a romantic storry. I hope it´s OK.

What it is for me, it is for me. What it winds up being for you, that's just what it winds up being for you. Sometimes I'm trying to communicate something, sometimes I'm just playing (trying to understand something) and sometimes I'm just trying to provoke some kind of reaction. It's all good.

But, if you don't see a "romance", that's perfectly OK. Most romances don't run around killing people.

I still don´t know why they have to kill the people. You´ve said "Elisse" is not a vampire and she doesn´t live of blood. Actually if i remember correct by Mr. Frankenbeans was nothing for her to eat?

I don't remember saying she's a vampire, and I don't remember saying she's not. What I do remember saying is that if she is a vampire and can't bring herself to consume Frankenbean's blood, what do you suppose that might say about Frankenbeans? Collaterally, what do you suppose it might say about the girl? She did later on say that there was nothing at Frankebean's place for her to eat, which I should probably suggest is more apt to mean that there was nothing there she could accept. In tandem with the fact that I have indeed mentioned that people die when she gets hungry, it does stand to reason she might be a vampire. Also, this fascination with hiding from the sun.

Vampires as we understand them today (well, as I understood them when I was a kid some forty years ago or so) are the present endproducts of another kind of evolution. Cultures have come and cultures have gone, and with them their own particular pantheons and their respective antitheses. Maybe Elysse is something other, something of which an Eli-like vampire is merely a simpler form.

The point is actually moot. It's clear enough the girl consumes people in some way or other. Exactly what isn't really important. What's important is that consuming people is one of the most fundamental and most universal of taboos, which makes Eli and her kith and kin pretty much the ultimate in social transgression.

Their relationship is very strange. Orson is a pedophile. And Elisse although only "12" is also not new to sexuality.

Orson and Elysse met while he was still twelve under circumstances apparently not markedly different from how Eli and Oskar met. If Orson and Elysse had become physically intimate the very night she came back from the hospital to finish off her last "companion" or "assistant", would Orson have been a paedophile? Would Orson be a paedophile if he'd continued to be intimate with her when he was thirteen? At fourteen? At what specific point in time would their otherwise unusual but not universally transgressive physical relationship become something something normally considered abhorrent?

And if, at "12", Elysse had already known more than a few "lovers" over the centuries, does this make her a whore?

I have thought their are not smart. But now i think their strange behavior is based on the fact that they are mad and also heavy sociopaths .

Sociopathy, I doubt. It's apparently congenital and is primarily characterised by an inability to love and an inability to empathise. Neither child fits this description. Madness, on the other hand, well... if Elysse isn't 100% human, it very well could be argued she's "mad" by human standards. Orson, on the other hand, has apparently turned his back completely on society and devoted his entire existence to being with Elysse, stone cold serial murderess, which means in practical effect he's manifesting what most people would consider gross moral and emotional deficit of some kind.

Your having commented on how they "must be mad" has sparked quite a bit of re-thinking, and not just on my own part. For this reason alone, your comments are welcome.

What i also noticed. The other people are nameless for them. Even Mr. Frankenbeans is nameless. Yeah . Even they were nameless to each other until recently. Right? Actually this fits to the serial killer nature, because serial killers are all driven by some sexual deviations and of course are sociopaths.

No, they were not nameless even to eachother. She's always known he's Orson, and he's always known her as Christine. Even after she's told him her real name in this story, she's still Christine to him simply because that's the name that crosses his mind when he sees her face.

As for nearly everybody else being nameless, well, yes. That's a rather telling point, isn't it? Just as is Orson's disinclination to light the candle in the master bedroom because there were "too many flies", without ever giving a single thought to the bodies in that room that attracted the flies. People, in other words, just isn't highest in his list of priorities.

We are dealing with monsters here, but not all monsters have sexual motivations or appetites. Not all real life monsters known as serial murderers have sexual motivations. Additionally, since these are characters, as you point out, in a work of fiction and inspired by characters in another work of fiction, I'd suggest they're probably metaphors for some other kind of monster that may not even know the difference between sex and a solar flare.

[SpartanAltego]

Another excellent Orson and Elysse entry - I seem to be reading these somewhat backward, but it’s kind of hard to figure out where it all began! Well worth the read, and man if these kids aren’t both adorable and chilling.

[sauvin]

Another excellent Orson and Elysse entry - I seem to be reading these somewhat backward, but it’s kind of hard to figure out where it all began! Well worth the read, and man if these kids aren’t both adorable and chilling.

I just now saw the timestamps on the posts in this thread. It's really been six years since I wrote them? Tempus certainly does fidget, doesn't it? I still think of those two kids every now and again (and I'm still trying to find a photo on the nets that I can morph into the Elysse that I see in my mind), but not as much as I used to. I wonder how much they might have changed in the time since, if I were to try to write about them again...

[SpartanAltego]

I just now saw the timestamps on the posts in this thread. It's really been six years since I wrote them? Tempus certainly does fidget, doesn't it? I still think of those two kids every now and again (and I'm still trying to find a photo on the nets that I can morph into the Elysse that I see in my mind), but not as much as I used to. I wonder how much they might have changed in the time since, if I were to try to write about them again...

You could count me as an avid reader should you decide to do so. Your style of storytelling is right up my alley: lots of nuanced dialogue, engaging imagery, and just the right amount of low-key horror to remind us we’re watching two (madly in love) killers of the night continue their paired journey. It honestly makes me wonder what your rendition of Let Me In/LtROI with these two would look like. The few references to Orson’s past imply it happened much the same as we know it, but there’s still some potential room for surprises. Not to mention the early years of Orson being catatonic and led around by Elysse.

If they’ve changed, though, I think it would reflect how you’ve changed. The children of 2012 are still-frame photos of you in that time. The question perhaps isn’t if they’ve changed, but how much and in what way. Perhaps it’s time for another photo to be taken.

[sauvin]

[sauvin]

SpartanEgo, the fact that you're reading them out of order is my fault. I didn't do very well with keeping things organised, and that's partly because I didn't take anything very seriously at the time. I wrote a few lines, then I wrote a few more lines, and that process kept up until I decided it might be good enough to post and have everybody laugh at. They're all over the place because I didn't try to collect them into "books" or "chapters" or anything, I just posted them any old where.

For you, and for anybody else who might be interested, here are the Shadows stories thus far posted, in chronological order (by posting date):

02/08/12 Shadows in the Night
06/17/12 Shadows Whispering in the Night
06/23/12 Love Between Shadows
03/02/14 A Shadow Rises
03/09/14 The Shadow Almost Seen

I don't really write, per se; for me, it's not a "craft". I just fire up a word processor and let my fingers capture whatever's going through my mind at the time. Later on, I'll make a pass or two through it, looking for things like bad grammar, excessive verbosity, excessively foul language, NC-17 text and the like, but I won't usually massage my "work" otherwise. The results are usually a bit convoluted, a bit incoherent and even outright nonsensically meandering.

All of them have discussion links, and there's been a bit of fairly interesting discussion around some of them. I still think they're garbage, but the first one moved me most on re-reading.

I've written a few others but really remember them only very vaguely. They were "streams of consciousness" things as I tried to explore some of what I saw mostly from the movie, although a couple of them were extrapolative. All of them are speculative.

Of them, the one that may have rocked the most boats is

02/05/10 Oskar at 40

which was my speculation as to what kind of man the boy might turn into if he were to remain unturned but still stayed with Eli. It was partly in reaction to all the fluffy cotton candy d'aww going on in the discussion boards and the fiction sections at the time, and probably partly a reflection of where I was at the time in my personal life. Read any of these at your own risk, but read this last with special caution if you're in the d'aww camp. It's nasty.

I've spent three pleasant (?!?) days revisiting what I'd done while working on a new entry, and am having trouble with deciding where or how to chop it up. It's a monster - unfinished! - at thirty pages. If you're up for thirty or more pages of soap opera drivel, I'll chuck some kind of halfway logical ending onto it and post it more or less as is. Otherwise, I'm going to have to do what I've never done before: I'm going to have to massage it, maybe re-arrange it and run it through a soup strainer.

[SpartanAltego]

Snip!

Thanks a million, sauvin. I'll be gobbling up the rest of your work in short order - it's probably difficult to believe, but you are indeed a craftsman of some damn decent natural talent even if you don't consider yourself a "writer." Beyond standard techniques and little tricks of writership that you pick up along the way, all you really need to be a writer is something to write on and a story worth telling. Which I'd say you have, given that the "Shadows" compilation and "Oskar at 40" both are some of the better quality material on this site ("Oskar at 40" being one of my primary inspirations for writing LtLNE, matter of fact).

Eager as I am to read more from you right away I'll have to advocate that you take your time with it and post when you feel it's ready! Strain it, mash it, boil it, get all the things you need out of it out. Then present your best foot forward. We'll most assuredly be waiting. And in the meantime, I can catch up on the rest of Shadows.