metoo wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2018 7:46 pm
As a writer of fan fiction, I have contemplated this issue. Where would we most likely find Oskar and Eli - in a dense city or in a remote and sparsely populated place?
I tend to favour the dense city. While the risk of discovery might be higher there, because of all the people, the availability of candidate victims is higher as well.
Rural, sparsely populated regions tend to be socially well knit together. If someone goes missing, it will get noticed. If several people dissappear in an area in a relatively short period of time, people will become suspicious and watchful. Therefore, O&E would have to be continually - and literally - on the run, to make sufficient distance between attacks.
Dense cities, on the other hand, tend to have large populations of people who have moved there, and who are not very well connected to other inhabitants. Especially so among the unfortunate who have dropped out and live on the streets. If a few of these disappears, it might not be noticed at all.
Now, it may seem that the disposal of bodies would be easier in a rural setting. But this requires that people there often walk around alone in desolate places. Do they? Is that typical rural behaviour? I’m sceptic. I think rural people spend most of their time in their homes or at work, like most of us do. Digging a grave near such a place wouldn’t hide the deed very well. Fire would work, but not too often.
So, hiding a body in a rural setting might not be that easy, after all. But what about the city? Well, to find a place in a city where a newly dug grave would go unnoticed wouldn’t be easy, to say the least. Perhaps in a churchyard, but... Anyway, burying might work occasionally, but wouldn’t be a reliable method of covering up. Fire would work as well, but, again, not too often. However, to raise the level of morbidity yet a little more, I might have a solution: the sewers. There are rats there, plenty of them...
All good points, and it makes me a little relieved that I already have a bit of a plot in mind for how Eli manages to stay under the radar in Virginia whilst still being fed. Hints are in one of the Parts in particular, but there's no fun in saying which one.
That said, living in a rural region doesn't necessarily confine one to only work or home. People enjoy their space, but they also enjoy wandering that space - and hunting season in winter time is excellent opportunity for Eli to ambush and feed in the wilderness without raising undue suspicion. After all, who looks twice at a sad but understandable rash of hunters falling prey to the wilds? It's not an air-tight justification, but it serves as a good enough rationale for me to keep the action in Waynesboro and the nearby territories even discounting the aforementioned "under the radar" scheme I have in mind.
But on the subject of body disposal in general, it's actually a little hard to imagine Eli going through with the process of hiding a body in any but the most crude ways (fire, for instance). He has the fortitude to do what he must to live using the tools of his vampiric affliction, but once that urgent need is gone the most he can seem to do is just ensure the victim doesn't rise. Heck, it'd be more efficient to simply use a knife or other implement to hide the true causes of death and exsanguination rather than the bear-hug method. Perhaps Eli doesn't
want to get used to that kind of work, which is one perk of using proxies to secure blood for him.
I had some other ideas as well before settling on my particular choice: for instance, as you mention, a churchyard. Graves are pre-dug in many areas days in advance of a funeral, so nobody would look twice at seeing someone working late at night digging one up. Eli could dig further down into the grave, bury the body beneath the initial layer of dirt, and then the next day or day after it's properly hidden by a casket and gravestone. Economy-class graves for the dead. It was discarded in favor of an alternative approach, but I might save it for a special occasion later on in the story.
"The dark is patient, and it always wins. But its weakness lies in its strength: a single candle is enough to hold it at bay. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars." - Matthew Stover