ollie aylen.

Back when, Ollie’s family had a bit of a reputation for being a somewhat tragic mess. While his maternal grandparents were generally well-regarded folks - the school custodian and librarian, in their day - their ability to be satisfied with the simple life drove their only daughter up the wall and, eventually, out of town, after years of escalating rebellion. Deirdre returned pregnant, with the father in tow; he was a stranger, a city boy with romantic notions of a seaside hamlet that were deeply disappointed. The two (almost three) moved back into the Aylen family house, and… spiraled, from there. They were both artists, in the most dysfunctional sense of the term, and neither were prepared to be parents. Ollie wound up largely in the care of his grandparents as mom and dad fought, drank, and desperately delivered painting after painting to gallery after gallery. They were a loud, impractical pair of people, the kind of couple that a small working town loves to shake their heads at. Nobody was shocked when the city boy ran off and never returned, or when their local failed artist kept failing under her own alcoholic steam. Her son, quiet, practical, grew up generally pitied. More so, after his grandparents passed - so sad, so sudden, a car accident in the fog. (Not that fog. Just a regular fog. Regular tragedy.) Then his mother, before he finished high school. She wasn’t mourned so much as her folks; bitter, resentful, a mean, lonely drunk with only a temper and wasted talent to her name, all she left behind was some half-finished hotel art and a heap of empty bottles. Just another regular tragedy. And Ollie in the wake of it, alone in the old family house. Where he could make something, even just - something small. And steady. A life of his own. And so he did. 

Before the Beast burst out of the dark, most would say Ollie had more or less succeeded. As the shadow of his family’s falling-apart fell further into history, he became a familiar and generally fond fixture around St. Brendan and Misery more broadly. Art had always been his escape, something deeply different than what it was for his parents; it was his art teacher who’d given him the tools to turn it into that, to make it his. He paid that forward, taking over the job when that mentor retired. Teaching wasn’t some kind of consolation prize - he wanted to share the wonder and the process, to give what he’d been given! That mattered. And how much it mattered, to Ollie, showed. It was a good place, his art room. By the time he really met Marlow Albright (THE NOVELIST), a fellow teaching student at the closest college, he’d cracked out of his shell and, well. Become somebody that someone like her could be charmed by. Why he broke her heart just as she was taking off, that’s another mystery Misery can’t crack. Some might wonder if he just couldn’t cope with the absolutely monumental success she was quickly becoming - a writer, a doer, making something of her work and herself in a way Aylens just. Don’t. That’d be unfair, and so, so far from the truth, but. It’s not like he’s explained himself to anyone. Not even Marlow. And then, just as he was starting to slip into a regular stool at the bar… it happened. This not at all normal fucking dog attack that’s. Done. This.