Risky Business?

[Ash]

I might qualify my previous comment to say that the very best helper for Eli would be someone quite unlike Haken in that he/she should have no conscience or feelings of guilt. Preferably someone with Hakan's cunning and deviousness but without the emotional baggage that comes with having a sense of morality. And while Hakan's morality is questionable, we can't question his intelligence nor the moral self-analysis and doubt that continually haunts him.
But I suppose that all of Eli's helpers have been people wracked by self-doubt and self-hatred and therefore not ideal killers. The reason being that one would by nature have to be such to play tag-team with a killer-child in the first place.
One wonders if Eli's sleeps and rejuvenation are a biological necessity, or that he, having no other experience with anything other than atrociously pitiful adults, chooses not to grow up simply not to be one of their kind. I wouldn't if I were he.

[metoo]

I might qualify my previous comment to say that the very best helper for Eli would be someone quite unlike Haken in that he/she should have no conscience or feelings of guilt. Preferably someone with Hakan's cunning and deviousness but without the emotional baggage that comes with having a sense of morality. And while Hakan's morality is questionable, we can't question his intelligence nor the moral self-analysis and doubt that continually haunts him.
But I suppose that all of Eli's helpers have been people wracked by self-doubt and self-hatred and therefore not ideal killers. The reason being that one would by nature have to be such to play tag-team with a killer-child in the first place.

Not necessarily. A barber might have had regular access to fresh human blood in a legal and socially accepted way, like I wrote in an earlier posting on this thread.

One wonders if Eli's sleeps and rejuvenation are a biological necessity, or that he, having no other experience with anything other than atrociously pitiful adults, chooses not to grow up simply not to be one of their kind. I wouldn't if I were he.

Probably not. In the novel he says that he cannot understand why he never grows up mentally, which probably would exclude a deliberate choice.

[Ash]

While it might be easy for some people, even medieval barbers (that pre-date Eli), or hospital workers, of blood bank employees, all of this presupposes that there would be people in these jobs who would be likely to "adopt" a serial killer child, for what reason exactly? It would be an uphill battle to Eli to find anyone at all to join her in mass murder, let alone a specific person with free access to blood and also with a mindset to join him in a free-for-all killing spree. He could target people with legal access to blood but the likelihood of also finding a willing mass murderer among them would be exceedingly unlikely.
And I wouldn't say that Eli knows much about the mechanics or processes involved in his re-birth process. Whether or not it is biologically or spiritually driven is completely open to conjecture.
I would suggest that Eli has had no or very few companions who haven't been the complete dregs of society. Opportunistic bastards wanting money or sex or both from a child. It isn't a pretty scenario or particularly idealistic or romantic. But as JAL says - "It wouldn't be glamorous to be a vampire....It would be very sad."