In its 1954, the alternate Elvis turns out to be a sexual predator who has already murdered Gladys Presley when John and Iz encounter him for the first time. He then tries to rape Iz, much to John's anger, and displays symptoms of psychosis and latent schizophrenia. His poor mental health is not assisted by his strong religious beliefs and an unexpectedly early divergence point in this world's past, where Valentinian gnosticism survived and became the dominant belief system in this alternate Southern United States instead of evangelical Christianity. This was noted in passing in Terraplane, with mention of an Albigensian Bible and a Valentinian House of God as background detail, alerting aware readers to the survival of Gnosticism in this timeline.
