Boricio Wolfe introduced himself to the world in chapter six of Yesterday’s Gone with the words: This is some beer-battered bullshit.
He had murdered a woman named Brianna the night before. Then the world ended, almost everyone vanished, and Boricio drove across New Orleans to see whether her body was still where he left it.
Readers loved him.
Fifteen years later, Boricio is still the most popular character I’ve ever written, and the most popular my story studio has ever produced.
Brianna does not get a chapter. Boricio is on his tenth season and first solo series.
Yesterday’s Gone started its life as a sandbox where Dave and I could write fast with abandon. We each took three characters, wrote our sections separately, then pushed everything together to see what kind of animal we had made. I cheated, and made one of my characters a neighborhood full of them.
There was no writers’ room or color-coded wall explaining where everyone would be by Season Six. We were a pair of storytellers passing the narrative back and forth, each trying to surprise the other without breaking anything we would need next Tuesday.
One of my two solo characters was an eight-year-old boy. The other one was a serial killer. Dave thought Boricio was interesting but disposable. A sharp obstacle for the first season, probably not strong enough to survive the second. The world had gone adios, and I wanted one of my survivors to see that as an improvement.
A few miles into an empty country, he passes a billboard and thinks: If the world is dead, at least it took Applebee’s with it.
I had no grand plan for Boricio, but the second his feet hit the hardwood floor in that opening chapter and the words beer-battered bullshit traveled from my brain to the keyboard, I knew who the character was.
Boricio heard language differently.
Most characters gave me a sentence. Boricio gave me the sentence, three indecent cousins, a nickname nobody had requested, and a metaphor that should have been denied entry at the border.
He was dangerous to everyone around him and ridiculously fun for me. My daughter refers to Boricio Wolfe as my personal Slim Shady.
Fun is fuel in my process. When I’m having that much fun with a character, I write faster, reach farther, and take chances I would’ve surely talked myself out of with someone respectable. Boricio gave me permission to swing at every pitch. If I missed, he would blame the bat, insult the pitcher’s mother, and steal third while everyone was arguing.
By the end of our first season, the throwaway character had stolen the story.
He was hardly the first monster to do it.
John Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667 intending to “justify the ways of God to men.”
Then he gave Satan all the best lines.
Milton’s Satan wakes in Hell, takes one look at eternal damnation, and starts recruiting. God has Heaven, omnipotence, and a proper answer to every question. Satan has momentum.
William Blake eventually called Milton “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Of course he did. Milton put virtue on the throne and rebellion behind a podium, then seemed surprised when everybody crowded around the podium.
The monster has been stealing scenes ever since.
Anthony Hopkins appears in The Silence of the Lambs for a little more than sixteen minutes. Clarice Starling carries the movie. She investigates the case, enters the basement, and earns the ending.
Close your eyes and picture the film.
Most of us see the mask.
Hannibal Lecter understands that a monster becomes harder to resist after learning which fork to use. He’s cultured where Buffalo Bill is crude, controlled while everyone else is sweating, and funny when no decent person should be laughing.
Tony Soprano gave the monster a mortgage and mommy issues. He murders people, worries about his children, and goes to therapy because the panic attacks have started interfering with waste management. Gandolfini could play him as a scared kid for a full scene, then somebody said the wrong thing and everybody at the table stopped confusing wounded with harmless.
Walter White started as the wounded boy’s chemistry teacher, told himself he was cooking meth for his family, then kept moving the finish line every time he reached it. By the time he growled, “I am the one who knocks,” Heisenberg had been living in the house for a while. Walter was the last one to admit who had answered the door.
Omar Little robbed drug dealers but left civilians alone. Al Swearengen ran a brothel, ordered murders, and could turn a bucket of obscenity into Shakespeare before breakfast. Each man drew his own line, then dared the world to make him cross it.
Boricio belongs in that company, but our prized character arrived from a Florida trailer park with his own dictionary and zero interest in prestige television.
Tony needs a therapist. Walter needs an excuse. Hannibal needs an audience.
Boricio needs everyone to get the fuck out of his way.
The thing that makes him appalling in life makes him irresistible on the page. Most of us spend the day editing ourselves for other people. Our spouse hears one version while a client gets another. We want something, feel the sentence form, and trim it before it reaches the air, because civilization runs on everybody keeping that first draft to themselves.
The only drafts Boricio respects arrive cold with foam on top.
Whatever enters his head comes out wearing somebody else’s tuxedo and carrying a tire iron.
In Boricio’s Gone, he wakes on a beach covered in black sand. The waves hit half a beat wrong. The moon hangs above him, “observing his resurrection with all the warmth of a coroner clocking in for the morning shift.”
The world looks “like somebody remembered Earth from a conversation.”
A Glock is “the Honda Civic of murder.” A portal to another dimension earns “I choose door number fuck you.”
Boricio causes traffic accidents between ideas that should never have entered the same intersection. Half his metaphors sound like the English language took PCP and woke up behind a Waffle House. The rest tell the truth before respectable words finish clearing their throat.
That voice gives readers a contact high. Boricio looks at every rule they obey and treats it like a suggestion written by someone he could pulp in a parking lot.
Readers get a vacation inside that freedom.
Then the vacation starts killing people.
Violence without a boundary goes flat. Once a monster can do anything, nothing he does tells us who he is. Bodies become wallpaper.
The great antiheroes draw a line.
Hannibal has taste. Omar has his code. Tony has his family, even when he is the worst thing that ever happened to it.
Boricio has children.
He will kill without guilt and enjoy it more than any of us would enjoy admitting. Put a child in danger and the decision has already been made. His body moves before his brain can file an objection.
Saving the child does not acquit him. It keeps the jury from going home.
Boricio can feel euphoric while killing a young soldier, then remember the dead boy had a mother. He can reduce a corpse to meat, walk into a kitchen, and prepare a meal with his whole heart.
Cooking is how Boricio says I love you without suffering the indignity of pronouncing the words.
Rose was his one true love, and she knew how to listen. She watched him come home with blood under his fingernails and a lie he hadn’t finished rehearsing. She knew what lived inside him. She also knew he would feed a stranger, spot a predator from across the room, and die before letting anyone hurt a child.
Rose loved him with her eyes open.
That was harder for Boricio to survive than judgment.
He could dismiss anyone who called him a monster. Rose knew the monster and expected things from the man anyway.
Hollywood has built a lucrative side door into villainy. Buy the monster, walk backward until the teeth haven’t come in yet, then film whatever happened to the child.
Maleficent was betrayed. Cruella watched her mother die. Joker turned Arthur Fleck’s abuse, illness, and abandonment into Gotham’s closing argument. Joaquin nabbed an Oscar. Some of those stories are terrific, but we’ve become addicted to explaining monsters until the explanation starts serving community service for the crime. Trauma can tell us where the blood started. But Brianna’s still dead.
Boricio survived a childhood no child should have survived, then grew into a man other people sometimes did not survive.
We weren’t interested in finding one missing memory that could transfer his guilt to somebody else. Boricio’s Gone gives him the childhood and the choices.
He has to carry both.
So do we.
Boricio understands monsters. He can smell fear, find leverage, and identify the lie hiding underneath a civilized sentence. But he cannot explain the part of himself that keeps protecting people.
Therapy was never going to work. So we gave him a multiverse.
I love multiverses when they’re done well (a category that keeps getting smaller while the genre keeps getting bigger). We’ve reached the point where opening a door and meeting another version of yourself feels less like a rupture in reality and more like running into somebody from high school at Costco.
Most multiverse stories turn alternate selves into possibility porn. Here is the life where you took the job. Here is the universe where you kissed the other person. Here is Spider-Man with a different haircut.
We send a serial killer across the multiverse to murder versions of himself.
Boricio has always been the most dangerous man in the room. Boricio’s Gone finally puts him in rooms where someone else is wearing his face.
One of those faces belongs to the Wolf, who greets his doppelgänger in a bespoke charcoal suit and says, “You’re the prototype. I’m the final product.”
The Wolf took Boricio’s violence, put it in a bespoke suit, and taught it to delegate. He has staff. Infrastructure. A goddamned logo. He can turn a human being into literal furniture and explain why it improves efficiency without raising his voice.
Boricio kills because he wants to. The Wolf kills because he has a slide deck proving why it scales. But the Wolf understands him.
Rose is gone. Boricio has spent years surrounded by people who fear him, need him, or want to fix him. Then someone with his face looks back and recognizes every private appetite.
Being seen by the wrong person can feel enough like love to ruin your life.
The Wolf offers power without apology. Violence with a uniform. An empire where mercy counts as a defect and Boricio never has to wonder whether the darkness inside him makes sense.
And damn him, Boricio likes being understood. He knows exactly what the Wolf is doing. Boricio takes the meeting anyway.
Underneath all the gunfire and dimensional fuckery, Boricio’s Gone gives our favorite character a harder target. Killing another version of himself would be cake compared to rejecting the one offering everything Boricio thought he wanted.
Most fictional killers let the audience enjoy the blood without touching it. Boricio hands us the towel afterward.
He gets the best line, spots the threat before anyone else, and solves problems using tools unavailable to people with functioning consciences.
Then a child looks at him with fear.
Then Rose enters his memory.
Then the man he killed turns out to have a mother.
Boricio has spilled too much blood to be the hero and sacrificed too much of his own to stay the villain. Every time we think we have him labeled, he uses the label to stop the bleeding.
Fifteen years ago, I dropped a serial killer into our sandbox because I thought he would make survival harder.
Dave thought he might not last beyond the first season.
Readers knew better than both of us.
Boricio survived the apocalypse, stole the series, and earned an entire multiverse filled with people he needs to murder.
I created Boricio Wolfe to find out whether our survivors could survive him.
Fifteen years later, I’m still writing to find out whether Boricio Wolfe can survive himself.
Sean Platt is an author, producer, and founder of Sterling & Stone. He co-created the Yesterday’s Gone universe with David W. Wright. Boricio’s Gone is their most popular character’s first solo series.