Simon McNeal

In the 2009 film, paranormal researcher Mary Florescu believes Simon is psychic and brings him into a haunted house, along with her partner Reg. Mary and Simon become lovers.

Some of the phenomena are Simon's tricks. But he swears something there is real, and it is: the dead have chosen him. Reg dies falling over a railing while fleeing a ghost. Mary finds Simon as the spirits cut words into his skin. She promises to listen and tell their stories, and the dead leave, sparing Simon.

What Mary did next comes out bit by bit. She got rich writing books from Simon's scars. He stayed young and became her prisoner.

Simon ran, and hitman Wyburd was hired to take his skin. Wyburd corners him and offers a quick death in exchange for the story. Simon tells it and dies. Wyburd packs the skin into a suitcase, but the blood pouring out of it floods the building and drowns him. Mary shows up unbothered, gathers the intact skin and smiles as she reads the new stories still appearing on it.

The 2020 TV movie tells it differently. Here Simon is a psychic who approaches Mary, a mother grieving her son Miles. The séance seems to work, and they become a couple.

Mary learns Simon cheated on her and faked the experiment. After seeing her son's ghost, she agrees to run the séance with him again to raise money. This time the ghosts really come and carve stories into Simon's flesh.

All three of the film's stories are written on Simon's back, and Mary is the one reading. One of them belongs to Bennett, a debt collector who kills a bookseller to find out where a valuable Book of Blood is.

Bennett reaches an abandoned town and finds Mary, Simon and Miles's ghost. There he's told that he's now one of the stories too.

In the opening story of the Books of Blood, Simon is a con man faking visions until the spirits in the walls write their stories into his flesh. Volume Six's postscript, "On Jerusalem Street", brings in the man hired to collect that skin. Rafi Gavron plays Simon in the 2020 TV movie.