Aliens, amnesia, and alcoholism
Jul 08, 2022 6:06 pm
Usefully unreliable narrators
Readers (myself included) love to discover things as the narrator does, peering over her shoulder as she shines her flashlight into the unknown. The problem is how to figure out a scenario when the person telling you about everything either doesn't know or won't tell you the truth.
The most common way of doing this is through a murder mystery. Those of us who love mystery (I suspect many of you do!) enjoy following our sleuth around to find the clues which will point her (or him) to the truth. Our detective doesn't know who did it, and they'd surely told us if they did.
The first contact-type story is another common way, and this remains a standard sci-fi trope. We're on a strange planet with strange customs. Let's figure out why everyone hides when the moon rises.
Psychological thrillers can't use aliens or whodunnits as much, since it's not within the genre, so they tend to rely on liars (like Gone Girl) and alchoholics who can't remember the details (like The Woman on the Train). The drunk narrator got very popular in recent years, but the problem with having a narrator get blackout drunk several times a week is that it makes me lose respect for them.
I'm not as much of a fan of lying because the narrator is our only door to the world and once they break that trust by lying to us, it's hard to get it back. Too many lies is like listening to a kid make up a story about why something got broken. "It was a boy, no a girl, in a red hat, no a blue hat, no a blue shirt, no I mean in brown overalls." Drives me nuts after a while.
Which leads to the weird solution I chose for Alternate Susan: the alternate reality. This is a lot like the first-contact alien trope in that the world itself is different and the narrator has to figure it out. Even urban fantasy has a little of this. The world has rules but you don't get them all at once. When I was conceiving of Parasitic Souls, I practiced with short stories, Joey's Undead Dog and Sleeps with the Fishes, about what happened with the world suddenly had magic and people had to deal with it.
Kit Melbourne's world is pretty well established, in terms of a magical manifesto, but the more I get into it the more I realize there's still things about magic I don't know. It's a lot like the real world in that way.
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Magic is Real (these books are free)
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