Plot holes in reality

By far the most tedious complaint about any given movie today is that it has “plot holes.” Technically, a plot hole is a contradiction or discrepancy in the actual storytelling that makes some part of the story logically impossible. These are not necessarily insurmountable—plenty of good movies have plot holes. But, in the way that the democratic spread of a technical concept always makes it stupider, the popular understanding of plot holes is that 1) they totally ruin entire movies and 2) consist of any unexplained detail in the story, no matter how minor.

This last point is key. Modern movie audiences both need everything spelled out for them and don’t pay attention, so even leaving out characters traveling between two points is sometimes called out as a plot hole. I wish I were making this up.

It occurred to me this morning while reading comments on the latest episode of an Unsolved Mysteries-type podcast that the plot hole has a close cousin in popular conspiracism—the “anomaly.”

Basic dictionary definitions of anomaly emphasize deviation from norms or expectations. Statisticians and scientists routinely talk about anomalies in their data, i.e, results they didn’t expect or that contradict the findings of similar research. But, as with plot hole, anomaly has a broader, looser, darker popular meaning. Read discussions of any recent event that has a conspiratorial angle on it and “anomalies” will pop up not as outlier data or unexpected details, but as trace elements of coverup, alteration or fabrication by Them, and evidence of hidden truths. This usage of anomaly is not coincidentally well suited to insinuation.

Both plot holes and anomalies may be minor unexplained details. The difference is that plot holes exist within the limited worlds conjured by storytelling or filmmaking and, unless the author invents an explanation as a patch, are simply mistakes or information too unimportant to bother about in the first place. An anomaly—as understood by the internet type scrubbing through footage of, say, the Charlie Kirk assassination one frame at a time—admits of explanation because it occurred in reality, limitless and limitlessly complicated. One only has to do good-faith research.

But, in actual practice, calling something an anomaly usually just creates permission to discard valid evidence because it isn’t perfect, to speculate and point fingers, or to venture entirely into a theory the conspiracist has already settled on. X is unexplained or unexpected, therefore A, B, and C.

Just an observation—perhaps more later. The aforementioned podcast episode was disappointingly weak for a generally good show, so this will probably be on my mind for a while. More than usual, anyway.

Addendum: An anomaly in written accounts or eyewitness testimony will usually be called a discrepancy, with almost identical results.

Against director’s cuts

Here’s a very good Substack essay that dares to say something I’ve thought for a long, long time: the theatrical cuts of The Lord of the Rings are better than the extended editions.

The author, Ryan Kunz, offers several good arguments in support of this unpopular opinion, not the least of which are the pacing problems introduced with the extra footage but largely absent from the theatrical cuts. This is what initially disappointed me about the extended editions twenty-odd years ago. In The Fellowship of the Ring’s climactic battle against the Uruk-hai, Howard Shore’s excellent music is chopped and stretched to accommodate additional action and orc blood, leaving seams in the soundtrack that I was never able to ignore. I actually resented the changes for breaking up the music. Fellowship, which is still my favorite and, I think, the best-crafted of the three movies, does not benefit much simply from being longer.

Few movies do. The movies that have actually been improved by a director’s cut are few and far between. Das Boot and Kingdom of Heaven come to mind.

But these are rare exceptions. Most often a director’s cut is a sign of bloat, of creative restlessness, or a studio cash grab. Sometimes a director in the grip of an obsessive spirit of experimentation simply won’t leave a movie alone, as in the multiple competing cuts of Blade Runner and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Much more commonly, a director’s cut simply offers more movie without actually integrating the extra footage well—quantity over quality, the whole problem with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings. Apocalypse Now: Redux and the director’s cut of Gettysburg, which has many of the same pacing faults I complained about in Fellowship, also fit the bill. The cheap, vulgar version of this is the spate of unrated DVDs from the early 2000s—especially in the horror genre—which were excuses for a volume of gore and nudity that would have precluded theatrical release.

And yet that spirit is not entirely absent from the Lord of the Rings extended editions. I remember when each came out, year after year, the first two were announced with a breathless promise that they would be not only longer but R-rated. This suggested a prurient interest in gore for its own sake that bothered me at the time. (Remember Peter Jackson’s background.) One almost sensed the disappointment as each extended edition, year after year, was slapped with the same PG-13 as the theatrical cuts.

In addition to bloat and pacing problems, the footage included in director’s cuts often consists of already inferior material. Most of the additional footage in Gettysburg is clunky talk, as when Pickett’s Charge is stopped cold for a monologue from General Trimble, complete with awkwardly looped score. Kunz also notes the cringey, anachronistic humor in The Two Towers. Théoden’s line in the same film, improvised to Jackson’s delight by Bernard Hill, that “No parent should have to bury their child” is similarly cringeworthy. A parent burying their child, not a father burying his? And in what world before our own would this be a reasonable expectation? The filmmakers betray their sentimentalism here. This is a scene that undermines its own sense of the tragic and the tone of the movie.

The ready availability of the director’s cut or extended edition, especially when it becomes expected, can also be a crutch, as I noted regarding Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. This was a disaster of a movie that Scott—notice that he’s popped up three times now—was already asserting would be improved by a longer cut before it even hit theatres.

There is also a fanboy dimension to all of this. As Substacker and fantasy author Eric Falden noted in his restack of Kunz’s essay, there is a certain maximalist “mimetic” quality to some fans’ devotion to the extended editions that feels purely performative. The way this is communicated is usually the giveaway: “Watching The Lord of the Rings again—extended editions, of course.”

That’s off-putting and sets off my anti-joining reflexes, but the artistic considerations have always been most important to me. Jackson, like any good filmmaker, worked really, really hard to make Fellowship, the trial balloon, the best movie it could possibly be, taking the fullest possible advantage of the medium—tight structure, fast-pacing, telling exactly as much story as it needed to in a surprisingly light and economical three hours. Its runaway success led to perceptible slackness in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, a slackness that turned to bloat by piling on additional footage for the extended DVDs.

This may have proven good fanservice, but it is not good filmmaking—or, lest we forget, adaptation. The Lord of the Rings excels as a novel. The movies should excel as movies.

Food for thought. I’m not against director’s cuts per se, of course, and I don’t hate The Lord of the Rings extended editions, but I think director’s cuts have to do much more to justify their existence—and fans’ devotion to them—than simply be longer.

Ruritanian notes

A few years ago I realized that, for the most part, I don’t actually like time-travel stories. I, who spend most of my waking life thinking about what it was like in the past! I finally decided it was because a lot of time-travel stories, under the influence of various kinds of nitpicking, get so fixated on the mechanics of time travel and its resulting theoretical problems like the grandfather paradox that actually visiting the past—traveling through time—ceases to be the point.

Something similar is at work in Ruritanian fiction. Ruritania is the imaginary Central European kingdom invented by Sir Anthony Hope for his great adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope’s story was so popular that it spawned a long-lasting subgenre of adventure fiction, the “Ruritanian romance.” Note the word romance carefully there. We’ll come back to that.

Last night I finished The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler’s first novel, published in 1936 when he was 27. It’s at least partly a parody of British spy fiction at the time—including the work of John Buchan—and follows a mild-mannered English physicist who, having revisited some pulpy spy novels on a trip, gets into a car accident and wakes up thinking he’s a spy. He winds up involved in industrial espionage in the Eastern European republic of Ixania, a corrupt state that has just developed the first atomic weapons.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but despite my love of Ambler I didn’t enjoy it very much. Even as I was reading the climactic action I was wondering why The Dark Frontier and Ixania weren’t working when Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev and its unnamed, fictional Eastern European state did. Then I started thinking about all the Ruritanias I’ve visited over the last few years, and which ones I enjoyed and which ones I didn’t.

Here are several novels set in fictional countries that worked, and worked well (links will take you to reviews here on the blog):

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Sir Anthony Hope (1894, Ruritania)

• Castle Gay, by John Buchan (1930, Evallonia)

• Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh (1932, Azania)

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh (1938, Ishmaelia)

• Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler (1951, unnamed Eastern European country somewhere near Bulgaria)

Here are several that did not work:

• The House of the Four Winds, by John Buchan (1935, Evallonia)

• The Dark Frontier, by Eric Ambler (1936, Ixania)

And here’s an outlier, a novel that I think illustrates both the weaknesses of Ruritanias and how they’re best overcome:

• The Courts of the Morning, by John Buchan (1929, Olifa)

I’ll stipulate here that when I talk about Ruritanias, I mean fictional countries that nevertheless are meant to exist in our world, not a fantasy world or alternate universe. Much of what I lay out below could also be helpful in thinking about fantasy worlds—though I have no time for alternate universes, much less multiverses—but that isn’t the subject here.

In mulling these stories after finishing The Dark Frontier last night, I found something in common between those that actually work. Judgment on Deltchev, the most obvious point of comparison being a later Ambler novel, is an indictment of Soviet show trials and Western acquiescence to the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe, all acted out through one confused, put-upon reporter’s moral struggle with the situation he’s been placed in. Ambler doesn’t even name the country in question. In a quite different vein, Black Mischief and Scoop are savage, blistering satires of modern journalism and efforts to “modernize” African nations. Castle Gay, which takes place in Scotland but concerns the upheavals of the faraway Evallonia, is straightforwardly a story of moral transformation through hardship. And the ur-text of the genre, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, is an adventure testing a man’s honor, loyalty, physical courage, and moral strength. In all cases, you get just enough detail about the fictional country to make it believable, but the heart of the story are the characters’ moral and ethical conflicts.

In short, the best Ruritanian stories work because Ruritania is not the point—it’s a convenient setting where real-world locations won’t distract and that allows the outworking of moral or character drama and action. Ruritania is a device. The “romance” or adventure comes first. Tellingly, all of these novels work as genre stories: Deltchev is suspenseful, Black Mischief and Scoop are unbelievably funny, Castle Gay and Zenda are fun and exciting.

When Ruritanias don’t work it’s because the nitty-gritty details take over from the characters. Following the climax of The Dark Frontier we get several pages about the events of a peasant revolution in Ixania, including which leaders took control of which government ministries and how many army officers were placed under arrest, and I realized I just didn’t care. And I didn’t care because I was not sufficiently invested in the main characters—physicist-turned-master-spy Professor Barstow and his sidekick American reporter Carey. (The first half of the novel, which is more character-driven, is much more interesting.) Likewise with Buchan’s House of the Four Winds, which has isolated episodes of thrills but mostly staggers along through over-detailed explanations of Evallonia’s tottering interwar government and the uncertain role of its populist movements. Buchan is telling a similar story of moral formation, but that gets lost in the details.

To bring the fantasy genre back in, you might recognize some of what bedevils these novels as “world-building.” This is the danger of making the world you’re building more important than the story, or of having a story too weak to support the world you invent for it to take place in.

The Courts of the Morning, the Buchan novel I suggested straddles the good-bad divide in this genre, is an instructive counterexample. As noted even at the time it was published, it occasionally bogs down in explanations of the geography, industry, and economy of Olifa, the South American republic where it takes place. But it balances this with a strong, intricate plot of great moral weight and redemptive arcs for several characters, all of whom are vividly realized. These mostly work well, and mostly counteract the overwhelming effect of industrial sabotage and train schedules.

This is by no means the last word on such a topic—the novels that don’t work have problems beyond their setting, for instance, and there are plenty of other Ruritanias I haven’t traveled to—but consider this post notes toward a fuller understanding of how best to use a fictional country in a story.

From the Themes Files: political novels

In his inaugural Substack post last month, Tim Powers recounted this story:

I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”

“Dracula wasn’t a metaphor,” Powers continues. “He was a vampire.”

That’s been on my mind because, earlier this week, a Substack note by novelist Aaron Gwyn—whose novella The Cannibal Owl I read last week and loved—turned into yet another Substack tempest in a teapot. Gwyn’s claim:

The political novelist is a fiction writer in diminished form. The great novelist’s intentions, motivations, and biases are forever obscured behind a rhetorical mask. The great novelist doesn’t aspire to be a political actor, but a ventriloquist.

I would tend to agree. See this post from last year about “the novel of ideas,” in which the novelist as artist becomes subservient to his message.

Well, Gwyn’s note got a lot of Substack litterateurs huffing and puffing. When Gwyn supplied a list of novelists who didn’t “engage politically,” one scandalized response read “You can tell someone hasn’t read Proust when he’s included on a list of writers who didn’t ‘engage politically.’” This observation is only slightly marred by the fact that no one should read Proust.*

More to my point, consider these comments by others:

Blood Meridian is about the military conquest of the west, whats more political than that?

Gilead is about religion and war and race and how all the above affect a family and has characters openly discussing whether or not they support Eisenhower.

The core conceit of Moby-Dick is treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility. . . . it’s explicitly an interrogation of American society and values.

Is it, though? Is that actually what any of these—novels in which ill-fated filibusters and scalphunters kill and are killed in the desert, in which an old man faces his mortality and yearns to leave something behind for his son, in which an obsessed sea captain dooms his entire crew—is “about”?

This topic sits squarely at the intersection of several of my driving interests and concerns, including two I’ve written about several times this year already: themes and particularity. Back in the spring I wrote about the overemphasis on “themes” in the study of literature, and this is what I mean. These specific examples, provoked by what I suspect is a bit of trolling on Gwyn’s part, are politically inflected and therefore even less tolerable than the usual.

Take Moby-Dick. Is that really “about” the working class and is it really “interrogating” anything? Or is it about one man’s obsession? To ask a question I asked back in the spring again with Moby-Dick in mind, would you rather read a novel about “treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility” or a novel about a maimed captain so bent on revenge against one whale that he drives his entire crew to their deaths in a round-the-world hunt? Which one of those sounds more interesting as a novel?

Let me put it this way: Visit Barnes & Noble and look at the many different editions of Moby-Dick that they will have in stock. What’s on the cover? Socioeconomic interrogation? Or a white whale large enough to endanger a ship?

Perhaps Melville, to stick with this example, really is doing what Gwyn’s politically-minded commenters say he is—though his thematic interests strike me as much more theological than economic or political. I don’t know. But whether Moby-Dick is actually “about” anything political, it would fail if it were not first about the captain and the whale. Particularity.

This is what I think Gwyn meant in his original note. A respectable theme must emerge organically from what is purposefully, deliberately a novel, a work of art. Approaching the work with a programmatic message in mind simplifies or sells out the art. It is “diminished” and “obscured” behind the rhetorical pose required of the message. Politics is the Procrustean bed of any form of art. It imposes on stories a shape that requires distortion.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Ayn Rand. Read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged with an open mind and you can’t help but be struck by 1) the talent she had in imagining and constructing vast stories and 2) the way she contorted and butchered her own art in the service of her risible messaging.

Gwyn, puckishly pressing one critic for his definition of a “political novel,” was answered with: “Presenting a view of how society and culture is organized through power structures, war, socioeconomics.” Gwyn rightly replied that “If you define ‘politics’ in that way, you’ve constructed a definition that’s sufficiently broad enough to encompass everything. In other words, you’ve emptied the term of all meaning.”

That’s what theme talk, especially of a political variety, does. Its vagueness is as much an enemy of good interpretation as the political is of honest art.

* What I have written, I have written.

Three items on learning by doing

Item: This morning Alan Jacobs shared a short post on Allan Dwan, who happened into the director’s chair by accident in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961. Along the way he gave Lon Chaney his break, discovered Carole Lombard, and—like many such early filmmakers—innovated both artistically and technically, those two aspects being deeply intertwined in filmmaking. Jacobs:

It’s fascinating to see how this industry—this art form—developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised—and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.

Item: Also this morning, Ted Gioia shared an essay on children and music lessons with a special focus on why so many kids quit not only the lessons but the instrument. In his own experiences with lessons, despite hating and quitting his piano them he kept playing on his own. Then:

I made up my own songs. I learned other songs I liked by ear. I actually played the instrument more after those awful lessons had been terminated. . . .

So I developed without jazz teachers, both as a musician and as a music historian. There’s some irony in that. I had access to amazing professors at illustrious universities, but jazz wasn’t part of the curriculum. In the field in which I made my reputation, I had to teach myself.

I’m not especially proud of that. Too much of what I’ve done in life has happened outside official channels. I’ve missed things by not accessing the right teachers at the right time. Things I did learn, I might have learned faster with proper guidance.

On the other hand, you learn very deeply when forced to invent your own pedagogy. And I take some comfort in knowing that there were almost no jazz teachers for the generations that came before me. Many of the jazz pioneers learned by doing—and they turned out okay.

The improvisatory, trial-and-error quality of both stories is fascinating, and both Jacobs and Gioia more or less directly point out that learning this way takes a long time—but one learns “very deeply.” Think of one of the greats in any field—filmmaking, music, writing, painting, science, even law, politics, and war—and they will almost certainly have started at the bottom, learning the nuts and bolts. Here’s a short list of directors who started off as gofers on the crew of low-budget director Roger Corman, for example.

But when you learn by doing, once you’ve mastered your art—insofar as that is possible in any art—a funny thing happens: your expertise translates into style. Which leads me to this third and final piece:

Item: Last week I saw this interesting Substack note from novelist Aaron Gwyn (whose excellent novella The Cannibal Owl I’ve just read and loved):

We all love a stylish writer, whether mannered and showy like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy or “invisible” like Elmore Leonard. But how will a writer or artist of any kind know what his strengths and weaknesses are without doing the work?

I remember learning once, when our kids were small, that playtime dangers are not to be avoided but embraced. Climbing trees, going up slides the wrong way, jumping off of swings, doing pretty much anything on a trampoline—these are how children learn what their bodies are capable of. It both teaches them limits and gives them confidence in what they can do. But they have to do it.

This is what I hate most about AI “writing”: by offering finished products without the process, it robs writers of all kinds—whether novelists, students, or office drones drafting e-mails—of the work. It tricks people into thinking they’re able-bodied adults while bypassing the whole childhood playground experience. It’s not only instrumental and pragmatic, it weakens the person who uses it without their even realizing it. But perhaps worst of all, the work, the nuts and bolts, is not only how you master the craft and art of writing, it’s one of the most fun parts of it.

Perhaps more thoughts on that later. But for now, read all the items above and note especially the importance of play and enjoyment in Gioia’s post on music lessons, and consider how AI advocates consistently portray writing—or whatever the process in question—as time-wasting drudgery. Someone is lying.

Archetypes vs particulars

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick—both movies about men wearing helmets in vehicles? Or more?

“That’s just like Top Gun: Maverick.” This from my daughter halfway through my explanation of the plot of F1, which I finally saw Tuesday night. I had just finished describing the way veteran driver Sonny Hayes was brought in to teach cocky young driver Josh Pearce and the conflict that brewed up between the two of them. This, to her, instantly brought to mind Maverick and Rooster.

She didn’t mean this declaration as snark or criticism, just old-fashioned excitement at recognizing a parallel, and the thing is, she’s right. I love both movies, and their stories do, superficially, have a lot in common. Does that mean that Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are, at base, the same story? Or that they’re in some way inferior or unoriginal?

I’d say no, and that both succeed magnificently as entertainment on the strength of something I’ve preached about over and over here: particularity.

Back in the spring I railed a bit against overemphasis on vague “themes” and “archetypes” and especially “the Hero’s Journey” as interpretive schemes for stories. These approaches fixate on similarity to the detriment of the specific stories they interpret, which are often oversimplified in the service of strained, banal, misleading comparisons.

And yet, whether archetypes in the full Jungian sense exist, the human mind was designed to recognize and respond to patterns. We generalize for reasons beyond time-saving heuristics. And comparing stories—tens of thousands of them over thousands of years—does reveal recurring patterns, motifs, stock characters, and structural conventions. Here is one early pitfall: those who argue that because there are really only X number of plots, creativity and originality are illusions and nothing but rearranging what has been done before. This plays nicely into the rise of the AI lovers, who argue for AI “art” and “writing” by dismissing actual art and writing along similar lines. But that’s another error for another day. For now: ye shall know them by their fruits.

That said, I’ll call these recurrent patterns and conventions archetypes for now. But like Plato’s forms, these don’t exist in any undiluted version anywhere. We have to discern them within the particulars of stories—vivid detail being “the life blood of fiction.”

Every story, then, must balance the archetypal and the particular, the general and recognizable with the concrete and specific. We understand this intuitively and condemn stories that don’t strike this balance well. A story that leans too heavily in the direction of archetype, of familiar patterns, or that fails to develop believable specifics and defaults to the archetype, we call stereotypical or clichéd. Both of these words come from the world of printing, of reproducing precisely the same thing over and over.

To return to Top Gun: Maverick and F1, they do have many similarities. In both, an over-the-hill legend butts heads with an arrogant but gifted upstart before both learn how to work together to succeed at a goal. This is a story familiar not just from these two movies, but from many, many other action and especially sports movies. No debate there.

What keeps these two movies from being rehashes of old clichés is their attention to the particulars, not just with regard to the highly specialized worlds in which they take place in order to feel realistic but also with the characters invented to tell the story. Sonny Hayes and Maverick are both veterans in their fields who are called back to action, but under different circumstances and vastly different pressures. Both might be loners, but Sonny literally wrecked his burgeoning F1 career and went on to decades of aimless waste and Maverick, whatever has happened in the years between his two films, is still successful, in fact at the top of his game. Sonny, a freelance race car driver, is called back as a personal favor to his old friend Ruben. Maverick is ordered back because he is in the military. His personal drama comes through his relationship with Rooster, son of his dead co-pilot Goose, while Sonny has no history with Josh Pearce and their relationship develops as a professional rivalry. And the overall stakes could not be more different—financial ruin for Ruben or nuclear war with Iran.

The two films also explore different thematic territory, but the particulars, the specific details that make this story itself and not that story, that make this character a memorable individual distinct from that character, could be listed at much greater length.

Particularity not only makes stories and their characters feel real—what would either of these movies be without their attention to naval aviation or Formula 1 racing?—but keeps them fresh. Stories that simply hew to the archetype fail as stories. Compare Star Wars, which, despite being famously archetypal, still feels real and vital, both lived in an living, and something like Eragon, which does many of the same things and fails.

Stories that lean too far into the particulars are much rarer and usually incomprehensible. You hear much more complaint about cliché, and for good reason. But a story that feels familiar but attends studiously to its vivid, concrete specifics can be not only well-crafted art, but a crowd-pleaser.

* * * * *

I’ve written about particularity several other times over the years: with regard to Song of Songs, romance, and “humanity;” Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which could not have taken place anywhere but where he set them; and James Bond and Honeychile Rider, a particular man and a particular woman with particular histories, not stand-ins for “men” and “women.” Particulars being “the life blood of fiction” comes from John Gardner, whose concept of fiction as a “fictive dream” has profoundly shaped my writing. I wrote about that in some detail here.

It was all a dream

I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.

That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:

One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:

• Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.

• Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.

It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.

But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:

• It is heavily foreshadowed.

• Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.

• The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.

• Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.

• Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.

• Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.

On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:

• The dream is thematically relevant.

The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.

I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.