Epistolary Web Novels

Epistolary novels are built from documents: letters, journal entries, ship logs, case reports. The form is as old as the novel itself and still one of the best ways to build dread or intimacy, since the reader only knows what the writers chose to record. Frequent pairings: letters-and-diaries, frame-narrative, literary-classic.

The form's power is what it withholds: you only know what someone chose to write down, and why they wrote it is often the real story. It builds dread better than almost any structure, which is why the classics leaned on it. Pairs with unreliable-narrator by default, since a letter has an author with intentions.