Characters / Alice Isn't Dead

The Narrator

- "There are times I hate you more than any of them, Alice."

Voiced by: Jasika Nicole

The Narrator of the show, she is a long haul trucker out making her rounds and searching for/talking to Alice. Until Part 1, Chapter 10, all we knew about her actual name is that Alice preferred to refer to her by nicknames.

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• AM/FM Characterization: In the brief opening log of "Alice", The Narrator sings along with Weezer's "Say it Ain't So," a story of Parental Abandonment and following in their footsteps by replicating their addictive behaviors. The Narrator proceeds to explain how she struggled to admit that her wife Alice had suddenly left her, and, upon discovering that Alice was secretly caught up in some sort of cross-country spanning Conspiracy, abruptly quit her job and started investigating, by travelling cross-country as an employee of one of the companies involved.
• Babies Ever After: She ends up pregnant thanks to a medical procedure and has a baby named Sylvia who she happily raises with Alice.
• Badass Adorable: She has a cute, youthful voice, and most fans picture her looking like Jasika Nicole.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Downplayed. The Narrator finds herself caught up in The Conspiracy her wife Alice was investigating, going so far as to get hired by Bay & Creek Shipping, one of the parties concerned, though its clear her interest in the conspiracy itself is generally secondary to its usefulness in locating her missing wife. Agents of the Conspiracy itself, however, don't much care for her meddling...
• Cowardly Lion: The Narrator is just a normal woman; not Badass Normal, just normal. And fear is a defining presence in her life; on good days, she's a worrier, and on her worst days she's a hysterical nervous wreck. But it was in the midst of various fear-driven adrenaline rushes that she beat multiple Thistle Men and at least one government agent to death with her bare hands, and she confirms in no uncertain terms that she is the one saving Alice, and not the other way around.
• Cozy Voice for Catastrophes: Downplayed. While the Narrator is capable of displaying agitation and fear, she's remarkably coherent and relatively muted when describing horrifying paranormal events that occur both in the past and in real-time while she's driving, where panicked babbling or wordless screaming would be entirely understandable.
• Determinator: The Narrator is stubbornly persistent in her quest to find her wife Alice, to get an in-person explanation for the mysterious circumstances around Alice's disappearance, even though this search draws her into unwitting, unwilling encounters with the paranormal.
  Narrator: I’ll keep driving this truck. I’ll keep wandering this country. I’m going to find you. I will.
• Diegetic Interface: Or recording device; all of her spoken statements are signaled by the on sound of a CB radio that would be common in a semi-tractor trailer.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Keisha earns hers. Living happily ever after with Alice, growing old with her, and one day dying peacefully.
• False Widow: Played for Drama, as, at a loss to explain Alice's sudden disappearance, and unable to conceive that she might've been left, the Narrator initially assumes (admittedly without evidence) that Alice is dead. She's so unshakeable in this belief that she attends grief support groups, right up until she sees her wife on TV.
• Hypocritical Humor: "I am a responsible goddamn adult!"
• Intrepid Merchant: The Narrator Exploits the mobility her long-haul trucking job offers in her search for Alice, while the narrative itself thoroughly Deconstructs the concept, swinging from the unglamorous, blue-collar banality of her actual job to the horror of her paranormal encounters. Given the contrast, she tends to take a wry tone when she repeats her employer's pithy slogans:
  Narrator: [I'm] a loyal employee of Bay & Creek Shipping, moving what is in one place to another, every mile a few cents.
• The Lost Lenore: Subverted. Though the story begins In Medias Res, the Narrator spends portions of the second episode recounting how she utterly convinced herself her suddenly vanished wife was dead, and was adjusting well with the help of grief support groups. It's the sight of Alice alive on TV that kick-starts the Narrator's new, life-defining quest, traveling the country as a long-haul trucker in the hopes of hunting Alice down and getting an explanation for The Conspiracy that prompted her disappearance.
• Nervous Wreck: She has clinical anxiety, and describes several panic attacks and stints of unshakeable worry that left her near-catatonic. It only gets worse once she attracts the attention of the Thistle Man....
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: She beats the Thistle Man to death with her bare hands in the season one finale.
• No Name Given: She's the only character without a given name until The Reveal in episode ten, where she's called Keisha.
• Only Sane Man: Out of the three characters portrayed thus far, she's the only one who is disturbed when the Thistle Man starts eating Earl.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She's a tough, rock-music-loving trucker, but also gets very descriptive about baking a pizza while talking about her past with Alice.
• Violently Protective Wife: She's prepared to go to some lengths to find out what's happened to Alice. When a thistle man tries to kill Alice, she gouges out his eyes and beats him to a pulp.

Alice

Voiced by: Erica Livingston

The title character, and wife of the Narrator.

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• The Atoner: Alice hopes to repair her relationship with Keisha by travelling along side her and demolish secret entrances to Bay and Creek bases.
• Big Damn Heroes: Alice saves Keisha from the "Police" Woman in the final episode of season 2, just in the nick of time.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Alice describes herself as having anxiety just like Keisha. The difference is that she projects her anxiety outward and turns it into a drive to protect. The whole reason she got involved in the plot at all was because she saved a woman she saw being attacked bya Thistle Man.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Unbeknownst to her wife, Alice was actively investigating The Conspiracy before her disappearance, gathering information on three mysterious parties: The Cumberland Project, Vector H, and Bay & Creek Shipping. The discovery of her scattered notes prompts the Narrator to involve herself more directly.
• Jumped at the Call: Had no doubts about joining Bay & Creek after she happened to save a woman being attacked by a thistle man.
• The Lost Lenore: Subverted. Alice isn't dead, but involved in The Conspiracy and Wandering the Earth, and this revelation is the reason the Narrator's really traveling the country as a long-haul trucker.
• The Nicknamer: Always called the narrator by various nicknames during their marriage, such as Chanterelle. When she appears briefly in episode 10, she calls her Keisha.
• Not Quite Dead: It's right there in the title.
• The One That Got Away: The Narrator has totally restructured her life to chase after Alice, taking a long haul trucking job to capitalize on clues that Alice is Wandering the Earth. Though her pursuit is partly motivated by evidence that Alice is involved in The Conspiracy, the Narrator's logs sometimes veer into ruminating as though it were a typical breakup.
• Present Absence: Her disappearance set off the plot, and she's addressed over the radio usually several times an episode.
• What the Hell, Hero?: It's not harsh given the circumstances, but she does call the narrator out for chasing her all over the country, instead of respecting her wish to remain lost until found.
  • In season 3, she's on the receiving end of it from her wife, both for disappearing for so long and for overcompensating by being overly protective now.
  Keisha: "I saved you. I saved you, OK? So go ahead, kid yourself that everything you did was because I needed protection and so that justifies it somehow. But you remember this. You remember that I saved you and not the other way around."

The Thistle Man/The Hungry Man

- "It's a fine evening. Doesn't look much like rain."

A cruel and sadistic... man that's taken to following our heroine around. Has horrible eating habits.

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• The Adjectival Man: The Narrator dubs him The Thistle Man, after the word "Thistle" that appears on the right breast of his uniform polo shirt, in absence of his name or company logo.
• Ambiguously Human: He's described as a man, but there's enough things in his mannerisms and appearance to suggest that he isn't. Eating Earl and his apparent ability to pacify people by touching them certainly doesn't help. It's later revealed that he Was Once a Man... not so much anymore.
• Color Motifs: Heavily associated with the color yellow, he wears a yellow baseball cap and is also referred to as "the man with the yellow fingernails." The Narrator stresses repeatedly that they're a unique, translucent shade. On their first meeting, he's rotely and messily consuming an omelet, and its remnants coat his fingers and face. The town of Thistle Men looks greasy, and when Keisha kills the original Thistle Man, yellow fat pours out of him instead of blood.
• Conspiracy Placement: In "Nothing to See", The Thistle Man pointedly asks the Narrator if she knows who he works for while gesturing to the word "Thistle" on his uniform polo, obliquely revealing himself as an agent of The Conspiracy that ensnared Alice and the Narrator, though he doesn't elaborate further on his employer's nature.
• Empty Eyes: The Narrator describes his eyes as being "... flat. Like a bad painting of a face."
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Downplayed, considering that judging from the description he doesn’t look all that bad from first glance, just odd. But as we see his eating habits and other unnatural abilities it’s clear that Hank’s hatred of all that was different from himself has turned him into something inhuman, sadistic and evil.
• Faux Affably Evil: When initially approaching the Narrator, he engages in seemingly genial, folksy small-talk that leaves her unnerved. She notes that "nothing about his tone matched [what] he was saying," and subsequently pegs him as having decided to bother her from the first. He keeps up the pretense when inviting her to "see sumthin' funny," which happens to be a private display of his ability to pacify and slowly kill a hapless victim of his choosing.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Thistle Man looks human at a glance but there's several things "wrong" with him: his limbs move just a bit too awkwardly (ex: in "The Thistle Man" his walk is described as "like his legs weren't muscle and bone but sacks of meat attached to a torso"), and his greasy jaundiced skin seems too tight in some places and too loose in others, like his skeleton doesn't fit his body. He's also described as having yellowed, baggy eyes, nasty crooked teeth, and long, translucent yellow fingernails. He also is noted as having a nasty earthy smell like wet soil, or rotting fruit. See Ambiguously Human.
• Hypnotize the Captive: An Implied power, triggered either by touch or a continuous grip on the neck. The victim's eyes go "vacant" and they seem semiconscious or asleep, but still capable of movement. The Thistle Man uses it to walk truck driver Earl out of a diner and into a parking lot unobtrusively, to further demonstrate his powers and nature to the Narrator.
• I'm a Humanitarian: By way of revealing his Humanoid Abomination nature, he bites off hapless fellow trucker Earl's flesh at the site of an artery, and keeps digging more out from the wound to eat, in a rote, automatic manner as poor Earl bleeds out. Making matters worse is the Narrator's realization that there's no element of biological necessity in this. The Thistle Man is simply showing off.
• Name Amnesia: It is revealed in "What Happened To Hank Thompson" that as the eponymous Hank transformed into the Thistle Man, he slowly forgot his identity outside of his hatred, forgetting his own name in the process.
• No Name Given: His real name if he has one is unknown; Thistle Man is just what The Narrator calls him since the word "thistle" is monogrammed onto his shirt. The militant arm of Bay and Creek Shipping refers to him as "Vector H", AKA Hank Thompson.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Shows up in the back of the Narrator's truck in episode 3. After she already checked three times and found nothing.
• Serial Killer: Or at least, is known as one to the public. In public record, he's known as The Hungry Man for his preferred method of dispatching targets.
• Signature Sound Effect: Gets associated with a muted chewing sound, used to describe how he eats his omelet and Earl.
• Supernatural Repellent: Later revealed that the Thistle Man is repelled by the smell of heather. Keisha uses this to her advantage, smearing her whole body in heather oil before assaulting the Thistle Man town.
• Was Once a Man: Revealed in "What Happened To Hank Thompson" to be the eponymous Hank, a man transformed by his lifelong hatred of those different from himself into a literal murderous monster.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Sylvia wears heather oil because apparently the Thistle Man can't stand it.

Earl

- "Huh?"

Another trucker at the same stop the Narrator visits in "Omelet".

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• Dissonant Serenity: See Major Injury Underreaction. Also of note is when The Thistle Man grabs him by the neck and he goes into a trance-like state as he gets dragged outside to his demise.
• Eaten Alive: As a lesson in the Thistle Man's sense of humor, he bites off Earl's flesh at the site of an artery, and keeps digging more out from the wound to eat, in a rote, automatic manner as poor Earl bleeds out. Making matters worse is the Narrator's realization that there's no element of biological necessity in this. The Thistle Man is simply showing off for her.
• Major Injury Underreaction: All he does as The Thistle Man eats him is cry and bleed. No screaming, no cursing, just tears and blood.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Used as an object lesson on why you should fear The Thistle Man by getting eaten alive by him.

Sylvia Parker

A girl who joins the Narrator on her journey to find the Thistle Man for personal reasons.

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• The Ace: Despite being only a teenager, Keisha describes her as such. She says she's smarter, more powerful, stronger, "better than" Keisha in every single way. It's because of this she tells her to keep growing and getting stronger rather than accompanying Keisha on her adventures, because Keisha feels she's the best shot they have at defeating the Thistle Men once and for all.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: She becomes an Oracle- and a very powerful one at that -in chapter 29.
• Cassandra Truth: No one seems to listen to her about the Thistle Man (besides the Narrator).

• Embarrassing First Name: She's apparently Sylvia Parker Jr. She mentions how when men name their sons after them, no one thinks anything of it, but when women do it everyone thinks it's weird. She's embarrassed by it for most of her teen years and goes by a nickname but goes back to using her real name after her mother dies.
• Missing Mom: Her mother stood up to the Thistle Man a while back and now Sylvia's all alone.
• The Runaway: It's unknown what happened to her directly after her mother died but eventually she ended up on the road, all alone and making her way in the world until Keisha found her. She's very street-smart and savvy as a result of taking care of herself for so long.
• Signature Scent: "Like a walk through the forest." It's heather oil. The Narrator calls it "aggressively organic." She wears it to ward off Thistle Men.
• Southern Belle: Significantly more badass than the typical portrayal, but has a very strong accent.

The "Police Instigator", or Thistle

- "You’d know if you met me. You wouldn’t know for long, but it would be memorable."

Voiced by: Roberta Colindrez

A woman who is aggressively pursuing the Narrator for reasons she doesn't share right away. Where the Thistle Men are merely hungry, she's smart.

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• Ambiguously Human: Briefly talks about childhood fears, so in theory she might have been a child once, and mentions having "grown as a person". She goes on to claim she could take a person's arms off without tools, dismantle a person with just her teeth, and has trouble understanding the concept of threats, or being afraid at all for that matter. She even shrugs off having a giant shard of glass shoved into her chest.
• Card-Carrying Villain: As seen below, she loves her job.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: When we hear her talking, it becomes obvious that she does not have normal thoughts; while at a gift shop she mentions thinking hobby-horses are for either "pretending to ride a horse or pretending to carry a decapitated horse head around on a stick", she buys an armful of knives just because the place was selling them cheap, she marvels at the tacky and occasionally nightmare-inducing kitsch for sale, and later she tells the Narrator that the main reason she followed her to "The Last Free Place" was because her truck was going fast, and when something that big is going that fast, you wanna chase it. In her last appearance on the show, she takes her first, really long look at the moon, utterly transfixed and singing its praises while at the same time declaring what a pointless chunk of rock it is.
• Cop Killer: Come Season 2 Episode 8, she brutally murders a police officer and steals his car, and before that claims that she "feeds on police".
• The Corruptor: She mentions going to truck stops and other such out-of-the-way places, finding a man willing to listen, and "[whispering] a few suggestions in his ear". Later, that man will find her again, only now transformed into a Thistle Man.
• A Day in the Limelight: She narrates her first appearance on the show in "The Last Free Place", and shares narration duty on "Badwater". Before that, she has a preview bit set in Haugen, Montana, in "the largest gift shop in Montana", where she'd tracked the Narrator.
• Faux Affably Evil: When she first pulls the Narrator over, she engages in small talk that is unusual, but cordial... Then casually mentions that she could take both of the Narrator's arms off. From that point the Woman makes it clear that she's going to kill the Narrator, but her speaking tone is never harsh or aggressive. It could easily be friendly paired with a different topic.
• Humanoid Abomination: Possibly. She's threatening and ungodly strong, and Keisha describes her howling "like an alarm", but we don't as of yet know her true nature.
• The Man Behind the Man: The real power behind Thistle. Well, almost; she is Thistle.
• The Needless: Well, assuming what she said about going up to the moon someday and spending about three hundred years there to get a really good hunger going has any sort of weight to it. She mentions getting a car and then getting a house after "disposing of the previous owners", but those don't appear to be needs so much as just things she does.
• No Name Given: She has yet to give a name, or even be given a nickname by the Narrator. She admits herself that she doesn't have a name, but if she did, it would be "Thistle".
• Noodle Incident: Discussed in relation to a gift shop sign saying "What happens at Grandma's never happened".
  "Umm... Interesting. What exactly happened at Grandma's? I think legally you may have to tell someone."
• Not So Stoic: For the most part she’s portrayed as The Unfettered, disregarding all morals and emotions in her attempt to kill the narrator. However, she’s audibly shaken when Keisha mentions one specific word: ”Praxis”
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Narrator describes her as "haphazardly" looking like a cop. "Like all the details were wrong".
• Punch-Clock Villain: She is following the Narrator because it is her job. She is going to kill the Narrator because it is her job. This is an aversion; she loves her job.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: During her last encounter with the Narrator, she challenges the Narrator's belief that the reason she's still alive, despite everything she's seen and done up to that point, is because she's a Humble Hero who still has a part to play in The Conspiracy; instead, the Police Woman suggests that the reason she's still alive is both because she hasn't died yet, and because she's not a big enough threat to kill right away. She declares, moreover, that assuming that one truck driver is somehow important enough to singlehandedly play a part in a massive conspiracy is the highest arrogance. The Narrator is a nuisance and needs to be eliminated, certainly, but she is so unimportant that Thistle, Bay and Creek, and the U.S. Government can afford to wait until someone inevitably comes along and does the job for them; someone like The Police Woman.
• Resurrective Immortality: Shows up in the last episode, right after Keisha "dies", to declare that yes, Alice really killed her, she's died before, and will probably die again. And whenever she dies, she eventually wakes up on the side of a road, in a bush. Like a thistle.
• Sadist: She loves causing pain to her victims.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: She's capable of locating the Narrator wherever she goes. What makes that unusual is the Woman herself claims she can smell her across states.
• Time Abyss: Thinks of life and death in terms of a cycle, and has apparently been at... whatever it is she does, for a while.
• To the Pain: She entered into the equation with every intention of killing the Narrator, but first? First, she's going to hurt her.
  "Feed on you"? We just met. We have so much more to get through first, Keisha; I take. My time.
• Vocal Dissonance: In the podcast, she has a friendly, but sarcastic sounding voice, while in the novel, she's described to have a sweet, high voice. Neither of them match the words coming out of her mouth.

Hoodie/The Oracles

A group of mysterious humanoid individuals wearing hoodies. One of them is shown in security tapes from a gas station apparently killing a Thistle Man, saving Sylvia's life.

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• Ambiguously Human: They're implied to be at least human-shaped from the fact that they wear typical hooded sweatshirts, pants, and shoes, and have eyes in roughly the region of the face where they should be. They speak in raspy voices, and don't experience time the way the rest of us do. Until near the end of the series, their true nature is anybody's guess.
• Big Good: Implied.
• Creepy Good: They don't mean to be but their general appearance and cryptic conversations with the protagonists can make them seem quite eerie even to Alice and Keisha, who are used to this sort of thing.
• The Faceless: The Oracles who appear in the story are always wearing hoodies with the hoods up, which completely shadow their faces under all lighting conditions. If one gets close enough, a pair of blue eyes can be made out, but nothing else.
• Hunter of Monsters: We don't know much about them, but one of them killed a Thistle Man, so it's very possible they are this trope.
• Magical Barefooter: At least one of them, the first one that Keisha meets, doesn't like wearing shoes. They're filthy from the Oracle walking around everywhere barefoot
• Meaningful Name: Oracles were originally prophets in Ancient Greece who could supposedly speak to the gods and interpret their will. They often gave confusing, sometimes conflicting messages to those who left them offerings. Thus it's fitting the Oracles are called as such, since it's hard for them to talk in a linear fashion.
• Non-Linear Character: It is revealed in "What Happened To Hank Thompson" that the Oracles experience all points in time at the same instant. Thus, they find it difficult to determine what's already happened and hasn't happened when interacting with beings who experience linear time, and can't really provide plain answers to Keisha and Alice's questions.
• Occult Blue Eyes: The only known quality of their appearance under the hoodie is their pale blue eyes.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: While they can physically time travel to an extent, this more has to do with the way they view time. Since they view all of time at once, it's a little difficult for them to speak in a manner that linear beings like humans can understand.
• Was Once a Man: In episode 29, Sylvia ends up transforming into an Oracle, gaining the raspy voice, apparel, and all.