My first Kevin Lone novel, “Avita Doesn’t Love You,” features covert agent Kevin Lone battling a North Korean spy ring that is using a religious cult as a front.
“Avita Doesn’t Love You” by Thomas Hauck.
This novel, like the others in the Kevin Lone series, is written in an epistolary format. The word “epistolary” is derived from Latin from the Greek word “epistle,” meaning “a letter,” like the Epistles in the New Testament. The traditional literary definition of “epistolary” means that the novel is written as a series of documents, usually letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents have been sometimes used. Recently, electronic documents such as blogs and e-mails have also come into use.
“Avita Doesn’t Love You” is presented as a collection of third-party texts including newspaper and Internet accounts, Mars Risk Management (MRM) internal reports, and journals kept by the protagonists. A classic novel of the epistolary format is Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.’ Here’s why I chose to write using this approach.
- It takes me, the author, out of the equation. This is not my story, nor am I the omniscient narrator who reveals information to the reader. My flair as a writer is not the issue. I’m just the editor. I like it that way. I’m a big fan of Andy Warhol, who took the same approach in the visual arts.
- It allows every character to assert themselves in the first person, much like the characters in a play. To me this is very important when moral issues are being discussed. For example, a key character is a North Korean spy named Hannah Minh. To me, it was important that her story be heard directly from her own lips. Not that this would excuse her crimes, but it would make her a human being and not just a cartoon character. Likewise, the “co-star” of the book (along with Kevin Lone) is a college-aged woman named Jessica Kenney, who fearlessly and perhaps foolishly embarks on a dangerous journey to avenge her father’s death. I wanted her to be able to tell her story in her own words.
- Much of the book consists of Kevin Lone’s reports submitted to his boss, Lucy Gatling. But as we all know, reports tend to be factual. There are certain things you don’t say in a report to your boss. In the interviews with Kevin Lone that are also included, he speaks much more freely (in literary terms, he speaks in a different voice). We learn much more than if we just read the reports.
- Perhaps most importantly, nowadays people get their information from multiple sources. When I was a kid we had Walter Cronkite. If Walter Cronkite said it, that was all you needed to know. The days of the single-voice news source are over. We get our news from TV, newspapers, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and countless other sources. No one person has a claim to objectivity or to the “truth.” The same goes for the narrator of a story. There cannot be one truth as revealed by the omniscient narrator. Like it or not, we live in an era of multiple truths. To me, the only way to acknowledge this is to step back and let the characters report the story in their own words. Is this more challenging for the reader? Perhaps, but I hope that it’s also more rewarding.