You’ve succeeded in bifurcating my perceptions. Reading this—and thinking deeply about it—has calved my head in two. Into two at least.

More story thoughts.

With the appearance of the blue parasite monster thingy, we have a pattern in … jackets? I know the jackets are fashion representations of who you and I were/are, etc. Given the chest-sitter has your face, or your resemblance, it’s less a parasite than an externalized part of you/us—fine, I’ll include myself, here—doing the life-sucking, life-eating. That the creature not only has a face like yours but lip-syncs your thoughts, makes it a part of you. An uncontrollable part. Or maybe you can control it but choose not to. You chose not to enter your mother’s bedroom, and there was no thought of interfering or attempting to interfere on her behalf. This choice aspect is the scary part from the vampire’s POV, isn’t it? The vampire(s) here are not the inhuman equivalent of a wasp—or in this case a kind of life-force/spirit tapeworm—with solely the prospect of starvation/death being capable of frightening them. That’s not what you’re writing about here. You’re attempting to make me and the original M. Brown, and now you, more empathetic by grappling with choice. Beyond the curse of having to live, if not forever, then for a fuckload of time, and what that might do to our minds, how do we justify our living off others? Your vampire must lie to herself about being a good friend—or in your case, being a good son—but still having to subsist off the loved one’s, um, subsistence. Why is it always someone closest to us, someone we love? Why can’t we choose someone else? Can we choose? Is our having no choice a lie, or the lie? When you believe you have no choice, it frees you from personal/societal responsibilities. Our choosing to have no choice ultimately makes us vampires more human. Or something like that.

Yeah, that stuff is cool to think about and all that, but this is still a novel, a story. And more pertinent to this story is the bit here where your mother blurted out a name different from Mercy. I was surprised you didn’t comment or write about it at that point or at any point. Maybe you’re in one of those forest-for-the-trees situations. the-Just because Mary is my real name doesn’t mean you can’t use it. I mean, fuck, you’ve used everything else, why not my first name?

For hundreds of pages the reader has been wondering if I am *the* Mercy Brown. Maybe at this point, they assume that, but I’d still bet your house that a part of them would be like, “Wait, wait, wait, the Rhode Island farmers already burnt Mercy’s heart and consumed her ashes. How is she back?” Which is fun, in a way, that they would assume the cure worked. Sure, it’s similar enough to the stake-in-the-heart stuff for someone to be culturally lulled into thinking drinking a heart-ash slushy killed the vamp dead. But in the world of this novel, if the heart cure worked, then why is Mercy still slam dancing around?