My Narratological Technique

As I am conceiving the elaborate scene next in my series where I’m riffing on the death of Sherlock Holmes as I appear to kill my main character as he fights Tucker Carlson on some rainy clifftops, one thing I wanted to comment on is the nineteenth century technique I borrowed to introduce myself throughout my series.

As in particularly volume one Seducing the Therapist we only hear about my alterego through the voices of the other characters before he properly appears. That was deliberate. This is a way of building suspense and creating tension. My Colin character is a dark mysterious figure coming into the light and going out of it. He’s supposed to be as dark and intriguing as I am. So you can’t see him entirely not for a while. I don’t let you.

Did I mention how much I love nineteenth century gothic novels?

It’s a great technique. Bram Stoker did this in Dracula where we just have the journal of Jonathan Harker the guy who visits him. In Wuthering Heights we have the tenant of Thrushcross Grange introducing all the weird sicko characters. In Frankenstein all we have is Frankenstein’s words to tell the tale when the doctor is rescued by a ship. Faulkner would take this word-by-ear thing to a whole new level a half century later explicitly in his first major novel The Sound and the Fury and then go crazy with it in Absalom Absalom.

And finally in the Sherlock Holmes stories every tale is told by Dr Watson so we never get that close to Holmes as a man.

So throughout my series I have random wives talking about me and jealous husbands just word vomiting about me flat out to the reader sometimes. It’s a cool technique. It also mirrors the real experience that some people had or still have about me as this character this personality working in a supermarket. People would come in there some days having heard about me from someone else. If when you read me it feels like you’re reading something from a hundred or two hundred years ago, that’s my intention. There is nothing good about contemporary literature. Nothing. I don’t read it. Stick to the classics and read them over and over again.