Deep Light uses a second person perspective, which is an unusual choice in the world of published fiction. While novels often break the fourth wall by having a viewpoint character address the reader or, less frequently, feature a brief chapter or interlude in second person (such as Marx’s death in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow), it’s almost unheard of for the reader to implicitly be the viewpoint character for the duration of the story. Literary works that employ this technique in full are usually experimental, like Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. However, second person is the norm in other forms of media, namely interactive fiction, where first or third person viewpoints would seem odd and irregular. The category “choose-your-own-adventure,” after all, has a second person reference in the very title. Because of the rarity of this narrative premise in literature, introducing readers to a second-person viewpoint character without confusing or jarring them is a tricky task. For an example of a book that used this premise, I turned to Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), written before interactive fiction made second person slightly more mainstream.

Bright Lights, Big City lays down its narrative premise right away. The very first word of the very first line is the second person pronoun: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning” (1). Right away, the reader knows that this is a specific you (rather than the generalized “you” sometimes used in other points of view), that this specific you is a guy, that this guy is in an unusual situation, and that this situation is happening now, in the present tense. It’s critical to establish the second person quickly and early, and there’s no sooner place to do so than in the very first sentence. Beginning the book with, say, description or non-character specific narration (as I initially did in the first draft of Deep Light, where I didn’t reveal the “you” pronoun until the third sentence), only to reveal that the story is in the second person, would confuse and disorient the reader. That might work for stories in more traditional perspectives like third, first, and omniscient, but second is such a rarity that it’s likely to throw unwitting readers for a loop. Hence this opening sentence must work on multiple levels: it simultaneously grounds the reader and hooks them.

Bright Lights continues to reinforce its second person throughout the first paragraph. When the sentences aren’t short and punchy, the writing uses “you” liberally: “You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings” (McInerney 1). To cement the reader even further inside the “you” character’s head, the narrator describes how “A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much [drug powder] already,” then moves in even closer with a description of “your” brain being composed of “brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers” who “need to be fed” (McInerney 2). This is perhaps the most intimate perspective possible: not only does the second person perspective address the reader directly, which situates them directly in the scene, but the level of interior detail places them in an almost stifling proximity to the narrator and his thoughts.

The text then moves on to inform the reader of “your” backstory by asking quite directly, “How did you get here?” (McInerney 2). (This is also reflected in the chapter title: “It’s Six a.m. Do You Know Where You Are?”) The reader, having just started the novel, is as lost in the new situation they find themself in as the drug-addled narrator is, and the text takes advantage of his confusion to let him reflect on his night and thus bring the reader up to speed. Interestingly, the backstory both separates the reader and character while also bringing them closer. The book could have made the narrator a great deal more blank, which would allow the reader to more easily project themself into the scene once they accept the conceit that they are at a nightclub and high. Instead, it decides to distinguish the two by sculpting the narrator into his own person distinct from whatever personal traits the reader carries to the text.

This reveals an interesting decision that anyone writing in second person must choose: by making the character more distinct, an author risks distancing the reader from them. While this is true for any perspective, the second person has a heightened risk of creating dissonance between the narrator and the narration due to the inherently personal nature of addressing the reader as “you.” After all, if they’re implicated in being a character they do not like or identify with—which becomes likelier the more unlike them the character becomes—the experience of the book is bound to be less pleasant than if they were just observing the character from the outside due to the disconnect. Naturally, most interactive narratives opt for a more blank, neutral character, because the point of the story is the choices the player will make as that character. But Bright Lights clearly has a specific and distinctive character beyond the audience-involved “you” the narration uses. This happened to me while reading the first chapter: the main character was abrasive to me, and hence it felt weird and somewhat icky to seemingly be him.

This leads to the question of why Bright Lights chose second person, placing the reader so close to its bratty, unpleasant narrator, which runs the risk of turning away all but similarly bratty, unpleasant readers. He becomes only more disagreeable as the first chapter continues, mentally whining about the “girls” in the club he’s chosen to attend, calling one “The sexual equivalent of fast food” (McInerney 6), and smugly reflecting on himself as a highbrow art connoisseur. But it seems that McInerney is not endorsing the narrator’s behavior, and it’s doubtful that he’s hoping to attract only readers who honestly and uncritically identify with the main character. Perhaps the second person is meant to make the reader reflect on their own similarities to the character or make a point about how we all could slide into being someone like him if our lives had gone a similar way. Themes of the book and things the narrator goes through—feeling adrift, displaced, apathetic towards the world, coping with loss—are near-universal human experiences, and though the narrator might be a frustrating character to be linked with, I wonder if McInerney is challenging us, as readers, to understand him. Even the most abrasive individuals have reasons for being the way that they are.

Whatever the reason for its second person premise, Bright Lights served as a good case study in how to quickly establish the unusual narrative perspective and set readers’ expectations for their relationship with the main character without sacrificing the opening hook that all stories, no matter the perspective, must have. This is an important task for the beginning of any piece of literature that hopes to use an unconventional point of view, because otherwise the story risks confusing and alienating readers which is the last thing I, or just about any writer, would want. Whether or not I identified personally with its main character, Bright Lights is a good lesson in how to efficiently set up a second person perspective.

Mystery stories rely heavily on internal consistency and logical deductions. Nothing kills a mystery faster than a deus ex machina, relevant details being hidden from the audience, or an unforeshadowed solution appearing from nowhere. One of the largest appeals of mysteries—if not the main appeal—is giving the audience a chance to solve the case alongside the main character, speculating and learning as they do. This holds true regardless of whether the story is set in the real world, but speculative fiction has more footwork to do than realistic fiction: the laws of fantasy realms might deviate from our own and the detectives may have to contend with fantastical elements like magic. If the rules of the alternate world aren’t properly established and expectations set, readers are in for a confusing and frustrating time. After all, a mysterious murder in a locked room with no entrance is a lot less intriguing once you learn that people in this world can teleport.

The main fantastical element in Deep Light was the radiance, a blue energy source mined from the ground which forms the basis of the local religion. Radiance is central to the plot and setting; the story takes place in a desolate mining town, the radiance’s power over memory and local superstitions with kernels of truth lead Alex to clues they need, the villain is motivated by a desire to resuscitate the radiance mine, and the turning point of the climax hinges on Alex making a clever deduction about how the radiance works. Radiance therefore had to be extremely well-established or everything else would fall apart around it, but at the same time, I wanted to keep the substance somewhat unknown and intriguing, both consistent enough to support the twists but still uncertain enough to be mysterious. This was a very careful balancing act.

The Velocity of Revolution, which author Marshall Ryan Maresca described in a blog post as “a secondary-world dieselpunk latinx pansexual fantasy filled with tacos, motorcycles and psychic mushrooms,” tackled a similar story element in the form of the aforementioned psychic mushrooms. Myco is a drug which enables its partakers, who are mostly the rebelling underclass, to share thoughts and sensations with one another. Like radiance, myco was central to the plot and needed to be both consistent and mystical, and so the ways in which Maresca introduced and created internal consistency for myco—and where the novel fell flat—helped inform how I managed radiance in Deep Light.

Myco is introduced in the very first chapter when Nália, one of the main characters, consumes it during a motorcycle run to steal petrol from a supply train. (As with Bright Lights’ second person narration, it’s important to set these fantastical features up early.) The audience learns that the drug is most often used during sex—“Everyone she knew had tried the magic of the myco with some willing flesh” (Maresca 6)—and that the psychological effects of the drug are bolstered by speed, making it a useful tool for the bike-gang thieves to sync with each other and avoid police. This is her first time applying myco to something other than sex, and as she and her partner Enzu carry out their mission, readers find out alongside Nália how the drug works. While bonded through myco at the train’s velocity, the two are able to share physical sensations, communicate nonverbally, and sense allies and enemies in the surrounding area. Having established these rules, it’s a shock when Nália and the readers encounter something that breaks them: a policeman whom the drug doesn’t detect and who is therefore able to capture Nália.

The story then switches to the perspective of the policeman, Wenthi, and readers get to see the upper classes’ view on the myco. Wenthi, despite being upper class, had grown up in a time when the mushroom was used as a weapon of biological warfare and now has a knee-jerk reaction to its use. In a conversation with Dr. Shebiruht, a woman who turns out to have been the architect of the myco-based bio weapons, Wenthi explains that he believes that “You can lose yourself into it. Too much, you go all the way into yourself, into the other person, and both of you become shells, locked into your body. Or a mindless empty” (Maresca 63). He recalls newsreels of victims in Nemuspia who “became mindless horrors, their bodies wasted and withered [...] Millions upon millions, turned from vibrant, vital people into empty shells that only knew hunger” (Maresca 68) when a myco weapon designed by Shebiruht accidentally went off. Shebiruht, who thinks this view is ignorant and finds the Nemuspia incident embarrassing, reveals to Wenthi and the reader that there are many location-specific strains of myco, and the atrocities she orchestrated were not founded on the local one. Her experiments mixing them have led to effects that will allow Wenthi to go undercover by placing Nália’s consciousness in his mind through a one-way connection (rather than the usual two-way connection) that he has dominance over.

This combination of powers has the potential to seem arbitrary, but the book has set up an internal logic that makes the powers of the myco feel rational. Nália’s experience on the drug establishes what the local strain of myco can do and suggests more broadly that its powers affect the mental states and relationships of people using the drug. Once readers find out that there are more strains, it feels consistent both that they have different powers and that the different powers also affect users’ mental states in ways that seem complementary to the main strain. The “family resemblance” of these powers keeps the myco from both becoming an inconsistent, random tangle of powers. The Velocity of Revolution also dodges concerns about why this kind of powerful effect hasn’t been widely exploited: Shebiruht is a cruel doctor on the cutting edge of myco science—a kind of Josef Mengele of mushrooms—and this is a completely new application of its power, while the rebels are poor, desperate, and oppressed, using the myco in the best ways they know how. (As a side note, the story uses Shebiruht to make a biting commentary about the willingness or even eagerness of governments to excuse war criminals if they believe their own states can benefit from the criminals’ service.)

The internal consistency of the myco’s powers—fundamentally, it alters or enhances the mental states of its users, and speed strengthens its effects—make it a stable part of the plot, and readers have a solid, grounded idea of what it can and cannot do. When characters use it in clever ways, it makes sense. For instance, because the story established that speed heightens the myco’s effects and that it usually functions as a two-way connection, it makes sense that Nália might be able to reverse the dominance of Wenthi’s connection to her during moments of intense speed.

Unfortunately, this stability begins to break down near the climax of the book. The myco’s powers become frustratingly arbitrary in the story, which gives us a cautionary tale on top of the story’s otherwise well-handled treatment of the drug. While I can accept that two people mentally who have been fused with a powerful form of the myco might be able to take control over each other’s bodies, I do not buy that they could control completely non-bonded, non-myco-using strangers’ bodies as well. However, this is exactly what happens during Nália and Wenthi’s escape from prison—which, in an added layer of inconsistency, is set in a completely stationary building with none of the bolstering effects of speed that would make such a maneuver slightly more plausible. The myco is eventually used in increasingly unconvincing ways: to mentally hijack radio waves (Maresca 272), broadcast a lifetime of memories into an unrelated person’s mind (Maresca 334), create shared spaces outside of time in which to converse (Maresca 328), and make foreigners violently sick (Maresca 348), the lattermost of which conveniently solves the central conflict of the book. In other words, the myco became overpowered through losing sight of the internal logic that made it a compelling contribution to the story in the first place.

That said, I do see what Maresca was attempting to do through this conclusion. Velocity takes place in a heavily Latin American-inspired setting and engages with themes of discrimination, colonialism, resistance, and caste struggle. The rebels are fighting an oppressive occupying government who, following a devastating war, took their land by force and shunted the native peoples into slums and shantytowns on the fringes of society, their magical myco outlawed. The caste system is based on how much indigenous blood a person has, and those with less or none are at the top of the hierarchy. Throughout Velocity, using the myco is both an act of rebellion and how the characters reconnect spiritually with what’s been taken from them. In a way, the indigenous myco taking back the continent is an understandable symbolic choice, even if it’s a questionable plot one. At the same time, though, using myco as a quick fix to systemic issues rings hollow if Velocity was trying to make a larger point about how to address colonialism in the real world, which it seems to want to do with how carefully it set up the world and its politics, its messaging about how solving the issue is larger than defeating any one person, that it will take more than just underclass rebels to institute real change, and so forth. (The ending also has unfortunate white savior undertones, but this is a separate issue from the myco’s inconsistency.) Had Velocity been a mystery, it would have fallen apart even more.

A common stumbling block in mystery stories is maintaining tension when there’s no immediate, obvious threat lighting a fire beneath the protagonists. This fire usually takes the form of time pressure (they need to solve the mystery within a given time frame), danger of a bad event repeating (the killer might strike again), or some combination of these. Time pressure is the surest bet, but it doesn’t work for all stories, including Deep Light. Until the twist that Maude is still alive happens and the time pressure of the full moon kicks in, Alex has no big reason to hurry besides their own determination. If neither time pressure nor threat is employed, the audience needs a reason to be worried for the characters beyond a broad, vague concern that it might make them feel bad or maybe damage their professional reputation if they don’t solve the mystery. That said, the latter can work in tandem with time pressure; in Zootopia, for example, protagonist Judy is set up by her superiors to fail when they give her a deliberately short time span to solve the mystery or risk being booted from the police force and failing her ambitions of being the first rabbit officer.

Malka Older’s annoyingly-titled 2023 novel The Mimicking of Known Successes has no time pressure or looming threat, at least at the start. The initial tension is a disappearance, and at first it seems that it was a suicide under strange circumstances but not ones that suggest immediate risk. Its second main thread follows a quiet rekindling romance between the main characters, which, again, does not have any built-in time pressure or threat. For the most part, Mimicking is a story about talking to people in an unfamiliar landscape (a series of space platforms encircling Jupiter). Because character interaction drives most of the narrative, with only one or two physical threats, it’s an interesting case study in contrasting peaks of tension with simmering valleys. The storyline of the protagonists’ relationship pairs with the mystery they’re solving, and each helps the tension in its own way: often, when one dips, the other peaks, building a jagged gradual upward line to the climax.

The story begins with a short prologue wherein Mossa, an Investigator, interviews a barkeep on a remote platform. The audience learns that a scholar (Trewl) from a large school in Valdegeld apparently visited and then vanished from the platform. In the first chapter, the POV of the novel shifts to that of Pleiti, a scholar at the same university, Mossa’s former girlfriend, and the viewpoint character for the rest of the novel. This chapter sets up the emotional stakes of the story while advancing the intrigue of the mystery plot as Mossa explains to Pleiti why she’s returned. Pleiti is unhappy with Mossa’s half-decade absence and her unattentiveness to their prior relationship. She’s worried about being used by Mossa. Mossa is clearly uncomfortable with how long she was gone without contacting Pleiti as well, but will not say as much explicitly. The tension is best illustrated in this short segment at the beginning of their conversation:

“What are you doing here?”

Mossa, I was pleased to see, looked a little ashamed. “I thought you’d suggest a cafe or something. But I’m glad to see your rooms. The scholar suites are—”

“What. Are you doing here?”

Mossa looked even more uncomfortable. “It’s work.” (Older, 12)

The dialogue shows each character’s approach to discomfort: Mossa tries to dodge around it, while Pleiti, clearly upset, cuts right to the point and doesn’t let her slide away. In the same conversation, we also see why the two still care about each other and how they would still be compatible as romantic partners. The exchange both sets up their relationship arc and gives the reader more details about the mystery as Pleiti presses Mossa. Thus the tension rises higher than its level in the prologue despite this scene being mainly an intimate discussion of facts.

The next section mostly concerns talking with the missing scholar’s colleagues, which, because they are mostly strangers, drops the tension from where it was in the first chapter. However, the gap is filled by the novelty of Valdegeld and how post-Earth human civilization looks. Pleiti’s department, Classics, is dedicated to the study of old Earth, and the Preservation Institute (or “mauzooleum,” as Pleiti calls it), the only locale where live animals still exist, is a central location to the story. They visit to determine why Trewl, a Modern scholar, might have shown an interest in the place, and the story receives its second spike of tension: a caracal attack (Older 42-43). After fending the big cat off, the two quickly set about theorizing whether it escaped or whether it was set upon them. This ups the overall tension again: rather than this being a simple missing-persons case, it’s now clear that someone is probably out to get them. Mossa and Pleiti return home to tend Mossa’s wounds and speculate, weaving in an exciting additional mystery.

The stakes rise even higher in the next chapter, when the homeless end-of-the-world preacher Rechaure is found murdered (Older 54-55). This is an interesting plot point because to the characters, the death is ostensibly unrelated to the Trewl case, but a genre-savvy audience knows that there’s no way they’re unconnected. That means that the increase in stakes largely exists metatextually as the reader waits to see how they connect and demonstrates that tension can heighten for the reader without characters being any wiser, even in a first-person narrative. The new intrigue once again carries the plot through another section of interviewing and a dinner date between Mossa and Pleiti, where the relationship is allowed to return to full focus. Pleiti remains uncertain as to Mossa’s intents, and Mossa seems distant and regretful for how unheeding of Pleiti’s needs she acted during their college romance (Older 73-74). Pleiti begins to hope for a new start to the relationship, but she’s still still unsure of the socially awkward Mossa’s intentions:

Surely she would not use me, play with my affections so that I would assist her? No, Mossa would know that she did not have to, and she could be thoughtless but she was not needlessly cruel. Was she, perhaps, hesitating to say what she wanted?

Or was she only oblivious? That was far more in her character, as I understood it.

(Older 76)

With the relationship potentially on the mend but still teasingly uncertain, the story returns its focus to the mystery and investigation of the caracal attack. More investigating and interviewing ensues, keeping the tension lower but still simmering. Two chapters later the next spike arrives, hitting on both the mystery and relationship axes: Mossa attempts to slip away from Valdegeld without Pleiti to look into a potentially dangerous lead, leading the latter to track her to the rail station. Pleiti insists on accompanying Mossa, who’s ashamed about the way she acted, and together they head to an abandoned factory. On the way there, Mossa reveals that she thinks the murder and disappearance are connected, and that they have something to do with the Preservation Institute, from which a seemingly random collection of frozen cells has been stolen.

From here, so close to the end of the novel, tension climbs without much pause towards the climax. At the factory, the two are attacked by Trewl himself, who they manage to subdue and capture, bringing him back to Mossa’s apartment. Interrogation gets them nowhere, and the two instead go for a walk to discuss the new developments. The conversation turns to their relationship, and during this exchange, Mossa admits that she’s been resisting romance with Pleiti because she fears she hasn’t changed since college and wouldn’t be good enough for her. The chapter ends with a kiss in a small garden. Pleiti, as a Classical scholar, takes a moment to appreciate the surroundings—and has a realization about the mystery that sets up the climax: the cells are not randomly collected, but all part of a potential ecosystem, and Trewl and his colleagues intend to return to the burnt-out Earth with them, steamrolling the delicate plans for planetary rehabilitation that the Classics department had been planning for so long.

The tension is at its highest in the book during the following climax scene, as it should be. Mossa and Pleiti rush to stop the rocket launch carrying the villains and the cells, but are unable to prevent it after a fight breaks out and Mossa is nearly killed. Pleiti drags her to safety and can only watch helplessly as the rocket departs.

The final chapter consists mostly of the protagonists recovering and explaining to the shocked authorities what happened. The question for the next book is what to do about the escaped rocket now that it’s out of reach, and the ending is still satisfying in that Pleiti and Mossa have embarked on a gentle restart to their relationship, now older and wiser than they were during their college romance.

It’s worth noting that Mimicking’s strategy also works due to the tension level it establishes at the beginning of the story. Had it begun with an action scene or something more obviously high tension, it would have set the wrong expectations for the audience, who might assume that the tension will be similarly high throughout and be disappointed by the lengthy interviews and slow investigations that follow. Instead, it cleverly begins its story with a conversation, more accurately setting the stage for what the main activities of the book will be.