Behind the Story: Where This Mystery Takes Us
Can a fable with talking foxes also be a mystery?
I’ve seen other writers on Substack generate additional reader engagement by sharing information about a story in progress. Since reader engagement is my primary goal for My Favorite Suspects, I’ve decided to give this a try. Here’s some background on Where This Mystery Takes Us.
A story, especially a mystery story, shouldn’t need an explanation. However, since this story is a departure from what many people expect in the mystery genre, I think it may help you to see how it fits in the bigger plan for this Substack.
On the surface, this story appears to be inspired by Disney movies such as “Zootopia,” which brought the genre of the animal fable to commercial success and widespread awareness. However, since I’m significantly older than Zootopia’s target audience, the real inspirations come from Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” the short stories by the fabulist John Gardner, and the graphic novel “Maus.” (If you like this style of genre-crossing, check out 11 Books For Adults Featuring Talking Animals.) And maybe a little bit of Kafka.
Stories featuring anthropomorphic animals almost always contain elements of allegory or satire. Animal Farm is an allegory about corporate and civil governance and Zootopia tackles discrimination.
Talking animals can also be a quick way to introduce complex topics by analogy (the trope of cats vs. mice used to establish a relationship of mutual hate between two groups) or using animals that embody certain characteristics in their culture, such as foxes being known as tricksters in many Native American and Asian cultures.
I wrote “Where This Mystery Takes Us” as an animal fable for several reasons.I wanted to write a story that involved a lot of complex topics but wanted to compress most of the back story, so the reader doesn’t have to dig through a lot of exposition to get to the action. I also wanted to take on a few themes that are controversial, and possibly even horrifying or triggering, without turning away the audience. Basically, I wanted to allow for someone to read it and enjoy it and never need to dig deeper into the themes. Unless they want to.
I knew it would be hard to sell but I felt that it works best in this form. (So far I’ve been right about the hard-to-sell part.)
After the story was rejected by several magazines, I tried rewriting it with human characters in more of a style approaching magic realism, but it made the story (from my perspective) much more difficult to read, because those difficult themes become more prominent. The thing that really brought that home for me was creating the story art and seeing the expressions on the human faces. I knew then that I should follow my wife’s advice and go back to the original idea of “talking foxes.”
Finally, this story represents a real stretch for me. I don’t normally write fantasy or allegory but I wanted to give it a try. I think every author should take risks like this to keep their writing fresh. I also think it still does fit into the mystery/thriller genre, in the sense that we’re all surrounded by mysteries, and when we choose to investigate them, we’re often investigating ourselves.
Please like this post if you enjoyed reading it. I’d love to hear your comments, too!