5 SFF Confessional Novels That Really Need to Tell You Something

Devil’s Call, by J. Danielle Dorn
Written as a letter from a mother to her infant daughter, Devil’s Call is the story of Li Lian “Lilian” MacPherson, a witch of the MacPherson clan. When her husband is shot dead by an unusual man named George Dalton and his two cronies, Lilian journeys through the South, encountering numerous grisly events and unusual characters, documenting it all in the hopes her daughter can some day understand what she did and why. Dorn uses Lilian’s confession to foreground a sense of foreboding, as Lilian would not be writing this story if she thought she’d come back from her mission, further driving home the already bleak cat-and-mouse game played between Lilian and the demonic Dalton on the roads throughout the South.

Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
The Campbell Award-winning Palmer’s debut novel is framed as the confession of one Mycroft Canner, a criminal sentenced to serve anyone who needs the help, moving from one job to the next, until a mysterious theft and the discovery of a reality-warping child in his house threaten to destabilize the precise order of the society around him. He inhabits an odd future world of flying car networks and massive computers, where frank discussion of sexuality and gender identity is a massive taboo, and works found to be upsetting to the populace are plastered with a variety of warnings. As a convict and someone who frequently and willfully broke the rules of his society, Mycroft is something of an outsider, and closer to the reader than others in his world. His frequent flouting of conventions—and his utter unreliability—helps introduce the odd language and worldbuilding conventions of the book while reinforcing how strange the setting of 2454 really is.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Shelley’s tale of gothic horror and science gone horribly right—perhaps the first modern English-language science fiction novel—begins with an arctic ship picking up a strange man who claims to be pursuing someone. The man, Victor Frankenstein, begins recounting his life’s story (we’ll avoid a “let’s be frank” joke), from his beginnings in Switzerland, to the act of making a gigantic eight-foot-tall creature out of body parts, giving it life, and becoming repulsed by it, thus locking the two of them into a cycle of revenge that is mostly Victor’s fault. By focusing on Victor’s recounting, Shelley considers less the idea of “evil science,” and more the mind of a man (after all, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster, as pendants love to remind us) who would push the boundaries of science to create such a thing, painting the portrait of a short-sighted man whose abusive treatment of his “child” twists the monster into the murderous thing he feared in the first place.

I, Lucifer, by Glen Duncan
Upon suspecting Lucifer might be gearing up for a second assault on Heaven, God offers him an unexpected choice: live as a mortal for a month, as sin-free as possible, and enter Heaven again, letting bygones be bygones. Or, when God finally defeats the forces of Hell, be cast into an endless void for all eternity. Lucifer readily accepts, but because he needs a “holiday,” instead choosing to live it up in a hedonistic manner and write an autobiography to set things straight. The resulting book is told in a cheerful, rambling stream-of-consciousness style by someone who clearly has a lot to say and wants someone to hear all of it. Duncan casts Lucifer not as misunderstood, but in fact proud of his place in myth, allowing him to become a delightfully unapologetic villain in a way that matches his equally unapologetic (and kind of cynical) world view. It’s a fresh take on the original antihero.

The Dracula Tape, by Fred Saberhagen
On a winter’s night, a married couple picks up a stranger on a mountain road in a seemingly incidental encounter. But the couple are the descendants of Jonathan and Mina Harker, and the stranger happens to be the not-quite-dead Count Dracula, who hijacks their car and starts up a tape recorder so he can correct the libelous words written about him in the novel Dracula. Thus begins Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, where the Count offers his version of events, from Harker’s fateful visit to the castle all the way to his (faked) death, bantering with his captive audience all the way. In the process, Saberhagen uses his narrator’s confessional tone to poke fun at the plot holes of the original book, and also to expand and examine the role of women in the story, with the Brides getting full names and even personalities, Lucy’s transformation getting more explanation, and Mina Harker becoming much more central to the plot. Maybe ol’ Vlad’s not so bad.
Confession time: we may be forgetting your favorite confessional novel. What is it?