Remus in People Like Us: Character Analysis

Overview of Remus in People Like Us: Character Analysis of the Novel's Enigmatic Threat in People Like Us by Jason Mott (2025) — a scarred, folksy figure who announces he intends to kill the narrator, then reappears across Italy and France, alternately stabbing him and carrying his unconscious companion to a medical center. Remus is introduced in Chapter 2 as a man with scarred hands and a half-bald skull, wearing a plaid shirt, stained jeans, and boots so old their steel toes catch the streetlight. His defining verbal tic is a folksy, almost affectionate menace: he inspects the narrator's teeth like a dentist, makes him pinky-swear not to overreact, and then calmly states he plans to kill him. He is not a conventional villain. He is charming, philosophical, and at times genuinely helpful—carrying an unconscious Dylan through Paris to a medical center, offering to teach the narrator how to use a gun, and hugging him with what the narrator describes as a feeling of home. But he is also a man who stabs the narrator in an Italian bathroom and later arrives at Frenchie's mansion to fulfill his promise. The novel keeps his origins deliberately opaque: we learn fragments—a Park Avenue driving job, a college girl in Toronto who gave him his knife, a grandfather killed in a Mississippi gambling fight—but never a complete biography. For a broader look at how Remus fits into the novel's structure, see the book overview.