Epistolary

An epistolary work is one told through documents the characters themselves produce — letters, diaries, reports, emails, transcripts, messages — rather than through a narrator describing events.

The form is older than the novel is respectable. Richardson's Pamela (1740) is letters. Dracula is assembled from letters, diaries, newspaper clippings and phonograph transcripts. Frankenstein wraps its whole story inside a set of letters home. More recent examples swap the technology and keep the shape: World War Z as oral history, Illuminae as a dossier of case files.

What the form buys you is unreliability for free. Every document has an author with motives, an audience and a moment of composition, so doubt is built into the structure rather than argued for. It also gives you a legitimate reason to withhold: a letter knows only what its writer knew when they sat down.

What it costs is a question you must answer on every page — why does this document exist, and who is it for? A diary entry composed mid-chase strains credibility. Many epistolary novels solve this with a fictional compiler or editor, which explains both how the documents were gathered and why they are in this order.