Synopsis
It’s January 2314, and Rowena Savalas is obsessing over a mysterious text in the internet archives. The text relates the story of Fairly — who walks the Horned Road while being chased by the ‘Breathing Man’ — and was posted in the summer of 2024. Rowena finds herself being drawn into the mystery of the text: Is it autobiography, fantasy or fraud? What’s the significance of the number 381 that keeps recurring through the book? And what does it all mean? This literary / fantasy crossover is an experimental take on a quest that brings the journey off the page and into your soul.
Review
It’s been six months since I read Three Eight One, and I still don’t know how to sum it up.
Maybe that should tell you everything about the weird profundity that Aliya Whiteley has managed to capture in this book of three layers. Why three layers? Well, let me start by outlining how this beast is structured.
Layer one is a fantasy quest where the protagonist encounters boxes that shift reality. Perspectives and tenses change from first person to second to third to past to present and everything in between. ‘Not experimental enough,’ I hear you say. Well, every section of this quest is divided, not into chapters, but into segments of exactly 381 words each. I don’t know how the author accomplished this, but they need an award. On this quest, the protagonist comes across the cha. What are the cha? What is the MC searching for?
Then there’s the second layer — an archivist from the future who’s recording their observations about the quest. Footnotes on every page provide an insight into this analyst — they chart a life, and this layer becomes a story in and of itself. The footnotes range from short to lengthy, and they interrupt the sections of 381 words to provide subtle shifts in pacing and tension. Why is the archivist obsessing over this quest? What are they searching for?
Then there’s the third layer — you. The reader. You’re part of the book because the whole thing is framed as a puzzle to solve. You’re figuring out the rich symbolism, the purpose of the world, the allegories and imagery — to form your own narrative from this fantastical soup. The book takes you on a search, but what are you searching for?
Three Eight One is an ingenious work of art. It’s unique, magnificent, chaotic, wild, and free. There are questions to be mined, but the answers you’ll find will be in how you piece together the puzzle of this quest, how you view its effect upon the analyst, and the impact of your own solutions.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it for six straight months, and I still don’t know how to sum it up, other than to say that it’s a masterpiece of experimental speculative fiction, and I really hope these 381 words will do.
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