Intensity (novel) - Characters

Characters

Chyna Shepherd

Chyna is a 26-year-old graduate student still coming to terms with her abusive past, who risks her life to save a young girl from a killer. She is trained to use guns and is inventive.

Edgler Foreman Vess

Edgler is a brutal serial killer who preys on men, women and children, according to his mood. He kills for the sheer "intensity" of it; he believes that life is all about accruing sensation, and that he must live with intensity in order to discover new sensations. He meets his match in Chyna, who repeatedly surprises him through the novel, and he even admits that she frightens him as he was not able to sense her twice in the novel.

Vess tortured and killed animals as a child and committed his first murders at the age of nine when he burned his parents to death after they caught him torturing a turtle; their death was considered an accident. Two years later he stabbed his grandmother to death because she didn't clean the bathroom to his satisfaction; he was judged in need of therapy, and was later adopted. He killed his adoptive parents when he was 20, once again by fire, for the insurance money and started his killing spree six years before the novel begins. By this time, he had kidnapped and killed six women and has been holding a teenage girl for a year after killing her parents and brother. In the novel he kills eight people, making his body count at least 22.

Ariel DeLane

Ariel is a kidnapped teenager who withdraws into catatonia. She has been held captive by Vess for months. Vess regards Ariel as a challenge because she has taken the longest to crack of all his captives. Vess longs to see her final breakdown but Chyna is able to rescue her. After the final confrontation with Vess on the highway, she's adopted by Chyna.

Laura Templeton

Laura is Chyna's best friend, who is killed by Vess.