I read “Incident at Devils Den” yesterday.

A spooky story for sure. True? I have no idea, nor care.

What I liked the most was the structure of the story telling.

Specifically, the lead-up to the “1977 incident” and the twice retelling.

It’s a great progression. First, we get hints while retelling background and prior incidents.

It’s why the the book exists, to document an encounter:

The genesis of this book is an event that occurred in 1977. While camping at a state park, a friend and I encountered an enormous UFO. It was triangular-shaped, and each side was approximately a city block in length.

The need to journal after the incident:

Back in 1977, my wife had encouraged me to begin a journal as a way of coping with the nightmares that haunted my sleep after the Devil’s Den incident. By recording everything, I managed to document the whole ugly mess of 1977.

The incident killed his friend:

I felt fortunate to have survived the 1977 event and all that followed it. Sadly, the third encounter would cost my best friend his career and marriage. A few short years later it took his life.

He was suffering PTSD and was triggered randomly one day while walking in a book shop:

Back in the bookstore she found what had scared me so badly. The face of an alien on the cover of a book. It was identical to the drawings I made back in 1977 and 1979. It was the same pointed chin, the shape of the head. It had just a slit for a mouth and no discernable ears. It was the same! That meant someone else knew!

He refused to talk about the event with a therapist:

A long pause filled the room. It made me uncomfortable. Maybe that was her intent. Then I told her about the two flying saucers I saw as a child. But the 1977 event was strictly out of bounds. No way in hell would we discuss that event!

The effect it had on him over the years:

Whenever Sheila and I discussed my 1977 encounter, the nightmares would return without fail. My poor wife was exhausted from years of being rudely awakened by her husband’s screams at 3:00 AM. Sheets soaked in sweat and a pillowcase with a drop of blood now and then. She was tired of it.

And more.

Then we get to it.

  • The incident before the incident, e.g. Kilo-5 (Chapter: Black Diamond).
  • The lead-up to the incident, getting ready to go camping (Chapter: Let’s Go Camping).
  • The incident from his perspective without the additional recall from hypnosis (Chapter: Incident at Devil’s Den).
  • The aftermath of the incident, e.g. waking up (Chapter: Surviving).
  • The incident again with additional recall from hypnosis (Chapter: Hypnosis).

And it generally works. The story pays off enough after so much build up.

Parts are chilling.

I reached for the flashlight and Toby roughly snatched it from my hand. He held his finger across his lips and whispered, “Be quiet, they’re still out there!”

I was shocked! In the flashes of light, I could see tracks down Toby’s cheeks. He’d been crying!

[…]

I kept my voice at a whisper, “Toby, man, you got to slow your breathing down. You’re hyperventilating. Toby you’ve got to tell me what’s going on damn it.”

RUN!

It pays off twice I guess, given the twice retelling. We get the payoff in waves over 3 chapters.

There are some jarring elements (cities on the moon, spaceships within spaceships and mega spaceships, human-alien hybrids ), but generally, it works.

It’s a great structure.

The lead-up is weaved naturally into precursor stories well.

In the second retelling, we skip over the details we know and focus on the missing patches. It is told real time during an interrogation is has an urgency.

The story devices used are plausible, I guess. Okay, at least they addressed and foreshadowed. This is unlike most stories of this kind where it’s info dump and no mechanism is suggested to address the hard questions.

  • How can he “go along” with events he remembers? ("Alien apathy")
  • Why did he forget prior incidents and details of the main incident only be remember later? ("Alien amnesia")
  • How can he have so much detail in his retelling? ("Journals")
  • How can he remember what he was told to forget during interrogation and hypnosis? ("Fighting the hypnosis and compartmentalisation")

I like it. It’s a reminder to re-read a story (or story outline) with a sceptical eye, ask the hard questions, then build in and foreshadow natural/plausible answers from the beginning.