When considering the mysterious circumstances at the centre of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes says to Watson that in order to begin, there are two questions that must be considered. Firstly, if a crime has been committed at…
In order to write this story, I had to invite my teenage self to possess me. I think that’s why it came out so fragmented, melodramatic, and desperate. I was trying to communicate something emotionally truthful about my adolescence even though I can’t remember with any clarity what exactly happened to me. My poor memory is part of why I’m drawn to fiction as opposed to memoir, although in this story I’m invested in memoir’s common thematic concerns: memory’s imperfections, personal culpability, and the relationship between meaning-making and the ability to identify what “really” happened.
Teenage me is something of an unreliable narrator. I love unreliable narrators for the same reason I love liars, cheats, magicians, and con men: because I’m compelled by the reasons someone might have an ambiguous relationship to truth. I enjoy the mediation between the performance and what’s “really” happening, and I enjoy the other question—if they’ll be able to get away with it. As a teenager with deeply repressed gender problems, masculinities based in artifice felt more attainable to me and their life-and-death stakes were large enough for my emotional reality to inhabit. That, and I found these archetypes seductive. The figure of the detective appears at odds with these sorts of unsavory characters, but thematically they have many of the same concerns—what is real, what can be known, if the self can be made so large and slippery that it has an effect on what is true.
Many of the storytelling decisions I make in this piece (the specificity of voice, obfuscation, deceptive foreshadowing, invocation of archetypal characters, and the mystery structure) are in service of negotiating the frisson between what really happened and what I wanted, without allowing one to subsume the other. I love fantasy, as in to fantasize or desire, because it’s a kind of storytelling that disrupts the truth/lie binary. A fantasy didn’t really happen and may be composed of lies, but it seems misleading to conclude that this makes a fantasy untrue. Like the facts of this story, the difference between fantasy and reality can’t quite be reconciled. I’ve always liked that kind of dynamic tension.
FRANCIS VAN GANSON is a fiction writer, bookseller, and organ donor. They attended the Clarion 2023 Writers’ Workshop, their short story “What I Know Is in the Ocean” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their favorite NASCAR driver is three-time champion Joey Logano. Their writing explores violence in movies, sex on TV, and what grief, trauma, and mental illness do to narrative. Some would say that they are best known for a One Direction fan fiction in which Harry Styles gets brain cancer and dies. Find them on Instagram @fire.motif.
