Plots That May Challenge of Change Common Perspectives

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Not all of the examples in today's post are exclusively related to the horror genre, but each of the techniques could be or have been used by writers of horror fiction.

Usurpation: a minor character becomes the main character.

John Garner uses this approach in his novel Grendel (1971), a retelling of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, in which the villain of the poem, portrayed as an anti-hero, becomes the main character.

In Gregory Maguire's 1996 novel Wicked: The Life an Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a retelling of L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Altered History: a sub-genre of speculative fiction, alternative history is based on the premise that historical events occur differently than they actually took place. There are many examples of this sub-type, including:

Ward Moore's novel Bring the Jubilee (1953), in which Robert E. Lee wins The Battle of Gettysburg, paving the way for a Confederate Civil War victory.

1945, a 1995 novel by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, wherein the United States defeats Japan, but enters a Cold war with undefeated Germany, rather than with the Soviet Union.

The-Future-Is-Now: visionary predictions of things to come form the basis of this type of plot.

George Orwell wrote a Future-Is-Now dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which a totalitarian government uses science and technology, propaganda, revisionist history, and other techniques to control its citizenry.

Intersection Stories: explorations of the crossroads between two opposites or extremes.

Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge (1968), a novel featuring a transgender protagonist, meets male and female and masculine and feminine binaries as it lampoons and challenges feminism, gender, sexual orientation, and social mores.

In Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers an early (1882!) comic novel by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, magic causes a father and a son to switch bodies, the father revisiting adolescence as his son experiences maturity.

Of course, Robert Louis Stevenson's Gothic horror novel, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), investigates the intersection of good and evil.

Alien Archaeologist: an alien or some other type of fish out of water (who may or may no be an archaeologist) studies human society and culture, often interpreting his or her experiences in an altogether unfamiliar manner.

My short story, “One Dilemma After Another” (in One Dilemma After Another, Volume II) (2018) is an example: an extraterrestrial military scout tries to hide among us, but his attempts to mimic human beings confronts him “one dilemma after another.”

Schizophrenic Studies: a subject is examined from a variety of points of view.

William Faulkner's 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury tells the history of the Compton family from the perspectives of Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason, whose stories touch on many of the same incidents, but provide their narrators' own peculiar interpretations of the vents.

Using these techniques often results in a truly “novel” (i. e., fresh) novel, since each technique offers a way to challenge or change readers' perspectives on the subjects of the books that are based on these approaches.