Comments on: Epistolary

By: James Wallis

James Wallis — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:16:28 +0000

There's an epistolary game: De Profundis: Letters from the Abyss by Michal Oracz, originally published in Poland in 2001 and released in English—you will probably not be surprised to learn—by me in 2002. Players play characters in a world where the mythos and cults of H P Lovecraft's stories are real, and write letters to each other about their investigations and discoveries. The entire rulebook also functions as an example of play, which is to say that it's told as a series of letters from an occult investigator, describing a sinister game that has been revealed to him. Obviously I think it's good. It's definitely unlike anything else. Chaosium still has a few copies.

By: Eric Harshbarger

Eric Harshbarger — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:46:36 +0000

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the first novel that comes to mind when you mention epistolary fiction.

By: Brandie

Brandie — Wed, 09 May 2007 02:53:51 +0000

Your correlation between ARGs and epistolary fiction has given me a lot to think about. I’m new to ARGs and old to the epistolary novel, and I would never have thought about them together. I’m looking forward to listening to the radio episode.

I do have a book I’d like to recommend to you, perhaps before you take on “Clarissa”, or “Pamela”. It’s a later epistolary novel by Wilke Collins (mid-19th century) called “The Woman In White” (recently it was made into a musical). The novel centers around a mystery of mistaken identity that the characters all tell in round-robin fashion after the fact; they pass the narrative off to each other depending on who was present for certain parts of the story. The telling includes documents and gravestones and personal journals as well as letters.

I reread it the other day, and, having ARGs on my mind, I was amazed at how much the novel had the feel of an ARG. Granted, my perception is probably colored by the fact that ARGs are new and exciting to me, but I swear by my pretty floral bonnet that the slow feeding of information by the author and the scramble of the characters to seek out and acquire the tidbits of information was so very much like what goes on in ARGs that it made the part of me not absorbed in the story quite jolly.

Of all the epistolary novels I’ve read, The Woman In White is one of the best, and it’s worth a read for anyone interested in the form.