Timeline issues

For discussion of the horror anthology containing John Ajvide Lindqvist's story What Kept You So Long?
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Siggdalos
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Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2020 8:22 pm
Location: Sweden

Timeline issues

Post by Siggdalos » Sun Jan 31, 2021 3:19 pm

Something that's slightly bothered me since the first time I read What Kept You So Long?: the narrator Tomas "Tompa" Larsson was infected by a prostitute in Barcelona a night in January and made his first kill "roughly a year" later in the first few days of 2009. In other words, he was infected in January 2008. His encounter with the passenger woman in WKYSL should occur 4 years later in 2012, based on how he tells the reader that he has lived for 47 years but stopped aging at 43.

However, the prostitute was in turn infected by Stefan & Karin (the "crazy old Swedish couple"), who only traveled to Barcelona in October of 2008 after seeing the photograph of Oskar & Eli taken in September of the same year, according to Let the Old Dreams Die.

Thus, Tompa's infection should only have occurred in January 2009 and his first kill in 2010. I'm not sure if the best way of reconciling this is to move everything in WKYSL forward one year (putting the encounter between Tompa and the woman in 2013), or to only move forward the date of Tompa's infection and his first kill while keeping the rest of the timeline the same, thus cutting off one year from his time as a vampire. (This may have some significance for one or maybe two different fanfics I'm thinking about writing. Currently I'm leaning more towards the former solution.)

Note that all of the above is based on the original Swedish version of the short stories. I don't know if the discrepancy was fixed in the English translation.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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