Gerd Allen Cole

Quick Facts

• Role: Attempted assassin and obsessive grad-student fan who targets author Scott Landon
• First appearance: Shipman Library groundbreaking ceremony in Nashville (recounted through Lisey Landon’s flashback)
• Affiliation/Type: “Deep Space Cowboy” (Lisey’s label for Scott’s most extreme devotees)
• Weapon: .22 Ladysmith pistol
• Key relationships: One-sided fixation on Scott; brief, decisive confrontation with Lisey

Who They Are

Gerd Allen Cole is the story’s most chilling real-world threat: a pale, soft-spoken “madman” whose parasocial worship of a famous writer curdles into public violence. His attempt to murder Scott at a civic ceremony becomes the trauma Lisey must unlock and survive, a memory that drags her back into the secrets she has avoided and the darkness Scott always feared was stalking him.

Cole embodies the collision of fame, devotion, and delusion. He doesn’t just read Scott—he appoints Scott as “Papa,” a private god whose imagined failures demand punishment. That warped intimacy turns Cole into a mirror of the external pressures that have hounded the Landons for years and a catalyst for Lisey’s courage.

Personality & Traits

Cole’s presence is all eerie contrast: childish face, hollow eyes; an unfussy calm in suffocating heat; tender, singsong language paired with lethal intent. He moves through the crowd like a sleepwalker on a grim errand, convinced he alone understands Scott’s “messages” and must “finish” what others refuse to see.

• Obsessed, parasocial devotion: He self-identifies as one of the deepest “Deep Space Cowboys,” translating Scott’s fiction into private gospel and recasting the author as “Papa,” a figure who must answer for “all these repetitions.”
• Delusional poetics: His speech turns to cryptic, musical nonsense—“churchbells,” “dirty flowers,” and “freesias”—as if coded meaning is blooming everywhere. The style is lyrical, but the logic is broken; beauty becomes a delivery system for menace.
• Lethal resolve: Behind the “spooky-sweet smile,” he plans and executes a public shooting with a .22 Ladysmith, closing the gap between fan fantasy and irrevocable action.
• Disconnected affect: He appears sweatless and serene in brutal heat, lips moving as if in private conversation. The sweatless calm makes his approach feel ceremonial, not spontaneous—a ritual he decided on long before the crowd gathered.
• Visual incongruity: “Childishly wistful face” versus “watchful eyes,” “fabulous blond hair” over ill-fitting clothes and “substandard biceps,” long pale fingers like a shut-in’s; the boyish look hides a studied, adult violence. The Lennon comparison (“last days of his romance with heroin”) signals both charisma and decay.

Character Journey

Cole’s arc is deliberately static: he doesn’t change, he detonates. He enters the narrative through Lisey’s extended flashback and exits as soon as his purpose is served—injuring Scott, nearly killing him, and forcing Lisey to act. His intrusion recasts the Landons’ past in harsher light: the dangers weren’t only supernatural or private; they were also public and hungry. By stopping him, Lisey transforms from caretaker-in-the-wings to the decisive guardian of Scott’s life and legacy, a pivot that propels her deeper into memory and the shadowed places Scott left behind.

Key Relationships

• Scott Landon: Cole’s “relationship” with Scott is a delusion he’s built from Scott’s work—a devotion so absolute it flips into indictment. Calling him “Papa,” Cole treats Scott as both messiah and scapegoat, blaming him for “repetitions” and deciding execution is the only true fan-service: to end the story the “right” way.
• Lisey Landon: Lisey barely knows Cole, yet she becomes his counterforce. Her instinctive strike with the ceremonial silver spade interrupts his ritual and saves Scott’s life. In narrative terms, Lisey converts terror into action, and Cole’s collapse under that blow becomes proof that her love is as concrete—and as dangerous—as any weapon.

Symbolism & Thematic Role

Cole is fandom’s nightmare endpoint and a human face on the story’s meditation about art’s origins and costs. He represents the darkest side of the “Incunks,” the academics and obsessives who want to own Scott’s genius, not understand it. As an avatar of the “bad-gunky” Scott fears in his bloodline, Cole externalizes what the family dreads might be within. He embodies the theme of Creativity and Its Dark Source: the idea that inspiration draws admirers and monsters, sometimes in the same person, and that the most immediate horrors often arrive without any magic at all.

Defining Moments

Cole’s story is essentially one scene, but it unfolds with dreadful clarity and escalating stakes.

• The wrong fan in the crowd: Lisey notices a pale blond young man not clapping, wearing an almost tender smile that never reaches his watchful eyes. Why it matters: It plants the seed that danger can look like adoration—and that Lisey’s attention, not Scott’s fame, will save him.
• The approach and the mutterings: He drifts toward Scott after the speech, lips moving with private poetry—“churchbells,” “dirty flowers,” “freesias”—as if delivering a liturgy only he understands. Why it matters: His beauty-of-language masks a death sentence, revealing how art-talk can be weaponized into permission for violence.
• The shot: Cole fires into Scott’s chest with the .22 Ladysmith. Why it matters: The crowd’s celebration flips to nightmare; Scott’s body becomes the altar of his own celebrity.
• Lisey’s intervention: As Cole readies a killing shot, Lisey swings the ceremonial silver spade and stops him. Why it matters: It’s Lisey’s first unequivocal act of heroism in the past timeline, proving her will to protect—and launching the deeper excavation of memory that powers the novel.

Essential Quotes

"The churchbells came down Angel Street," says Blondie—says Gerd Allen Cole... "That rungut sound, like rain on a tin roof! Dirty flowers, dirty and sweet, that’s how the churchbells sound in my basement as if you didn’t know!"

Cole’s language is lush and wrong at once. The sensory beauty (“rain on a tin roof,” “dirty and sweet”) frames a private cosmology that collapses the public (churchbells) into the secret (his basement), announcing how he confuses the world of art with his own inner echo chamber.

"I got to end all this ding-dong," says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity. "I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias."

He casts murder as maintenance—tidying up the “ding-dong” of ongoing life, as if narrative repetition were a fault only he can fix. The childlike diction (“ding-dong,” “freesias”) makes the impulse scarier, not softer: innocence becomes a mask for annihilation.

"If it closes the lips of the bells, it will have done the job. I’m sorry, Papa."

Here the ritual logic is explicit: silence the bells, stop the repetitions, please the father-god he calls “Papa.” The apology doesn’t humanize him; it confirms his self-appointment as executioner in a story he thinks he’s finishing rather than ending.