Just Kristin

Per­son­ally, I find hor­ror writ­ten in epis­to­lary form to be espe­cially scary, as it is par­tic­u­larly good at pro­duc­ing a feel­ing of trep­i­da­tion and anx­i­ety. It does this by offer­ing an incom­plete first-person view­point with no nar­ra­tive expla­na­tion — one source of uncer­tainty — and also forces the reader into the posi­tion of the receiv­ing party, the hid­den par­tic­i­pant in the rela­tion­ship, wor­ried for the writer, which gen­er­ates another source of uncer­tainty and anx­ious­ness. If the story is rep­re­sented by the writ­ings of more than one char­ac­ter, the reader may end up with more infor­ma­tion than the pro­tag­o­nist, but due to the feel­ing of rela­tion­ship with him or her, the reader’s fear is height­ened rather than less­ened by this, due to the impulse to pro­tect — by a sub­con­scious desire to get this vital infor­ma­tion to the pro­tag­o­nist — even while con­sciously know­ing that this is impos­si­ble. A fan­tas­tic exam­ple of this: Drac­ula by Bram Stoker. Also, a story I heard on the more-than-worthy-of-subscription pod­cast, Pseudo­pod, “The West­ern Front” by Patrick Sam­phire.

No post here would be com­plete with­out an obnox­ious aside. Have there been any seri­ous (mean­ing not CollegeHumor.com posts) sto­ries or nov­els writ­ten in phone con­ver­sa­tion? IRC? SMS? Would they still be con­sid­ered “epis­to­lary”? Or is there/should there be a new word for them?