An Unauthorised Fan Treatise (on the nature of the relationship between actors Rob Hennings and Nathan O’Donnell on TV show Loch & Ness, by @gottiewrites)
Gottie is a fangirl for Loch & Ness, a TV show about paranormal detectives. She’s convinced that two of the male actors are secretly dating, and she’ll stop at nothing to prove it. When her online investigations accidentally uncover far more than she expects, she becomes complicit in secrets beyond just a romantic conspiracy theory.
An internet thriller told in a ‘true crime’ style recollection of events, the novel includes social media extracts such as modern Tumblr posts and early-noughties LiveJournal blog entries.
Review
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I’ve been a big fan of Lauren James’ writing for a while now. Her books The Loneliest Girl in the Universe and The Quiet at the End of the World are two of my favourites, so when I found out she was going to be writing a seralised novel with chapters being posted weekly online, I was ecstatic.
I quickly became a member of her Patreon just so I could access chapters early, because after reading just a few chapters, I couldn’t wait to read the rest!
This story is just SO GOOD. This is the first serialised novel I’ve read and I loved it. It’s full of the things that make me love anything that Lauren James writes: heaps of intrigue right from the start, a whole host of sketchy characters, and of course, plot twists galore.
Throw in an incredibly unreliable narrator and a few conspiracy theories and you’ve got something that is impossible to not come back to week after week to see what happens next in the Gottie Writes saga.
An Unauthorised Fan Treatise is an exploration of toxic fan culture, the power of the web (and why you shouldn’t believe everything you read)—oh, and the plot revolves around a murder mystery, too. How can you not be intrigued?!
I feel like this is the kind of thing I can’t tell you too much about without ruining it. You just have to read it for yourself. Trust me – it’ll be worth your time. And it’s worth going into it knowing practically nothing about it.
I’m sad this is over (I read the last few chapters early for being on Lauren’s Patreon) but I can’t wait to see what happens with it in the future. And I hope more authors follow suit with the serialised novel format, because it’s such a fun way to read a story!
You can read An Unauthorised Fan Treatise here – as of writing this (28/4), there are just a couple of chapters left, so you’ve got time to catch up before it all ends!
Have you read any seralised novels, including this one? If so, please give me some recommendations because I definitely want to read more of them!
