
Facts and Mysteries
The novel as found document has a long history. The gothic novels that helped establish the horror genre—think Dracula, think Frankenstein—often take the form of found documents, of reconstructions of uncanny events pieced together from letters and diaries. More recent novels have updated this concept in inventive ways: Ryan Chapman’s Riots I Have Known takes the form of an online prison journal, and Sarah Hall’s dystopian novel Daughters of the North is made up of computer files, which may or may not have been tampered with.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s 2009 novel Human Matter, now appearing in an