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< Excerpt from the draft of *When You Don't See Me*
I think the approach of having stories that flesh out the world and hint at its character, rather than a continuous linear novel, is compelling. Even if a novel is the end goal, the process is enjoyable to observe.
I agree, and I've liked the epistolary format since the first time I read Stoker's /Dracula/ and actually understood how the story worked. If you haven't read it (and I recommend fixing that since it's in the public domain and still holds up well for its age), /Dracula/ is basically a trove of documents—journals, letters, transcripts of audio recordings, occasional newspaper clippings—that act as primary sources for a piece of occult history. Even if you stripped out the supernatural trappings, /Dracula/ still works as a first-hand account of how a small group of friends in the late Victorian period discovered a serial killer, tracked it down, and dealt out vigilante "justice" because they were sure the authorities of the time would not have accepted the evidence they had compiled.
Since I started writing WYDSM, I've wanted to go full epistolary but have been resisting the urge. Annelise Copeland's arc (the beginning of which I shared in "The Revenge of Borgia Pizza") is mostly straight narrative, but after a few introductory chapters I've been telling Naomi Bradleigh's story through a private diary she writes on the computer implanted in her head and uploads to a directory on the VPS that also hosts her blog. She uploads the diary along with blog updates, and a cron job moves the file to its destination, a directory to which only her handlers also have access. I'm tempted to do something similar with Morgan Cooper's arc, but perhaps as transcripts extracted from video recordings of sessions with his therapist.
Of course, I'm not the only one doing epistolary sf.