“Stress management is knowing how to breathe. Stress management is knowing how to bring oxygen into your life. The way you do that is also how you eat. When you do it wrong people talk about you, but when you do it right, they watch you; they’re watching your actions.” Rohana, Priestess of Kemet
This page constitutes AI-augmented RESEARCH. Novels inspired by this research will be written without AI, in my own voice, as a true goth-noir memoir should.
I have read all of the novels mentioned here, most of them a long time ago. I received a classical upbringing, of which 'revenge stories' was only a minor aspect and never one which I was overly interested in. I much prefer spirituality. Analysis of the Structure of these novels has however revealed so much which I personally identify with. Too much. One item would be too much. I have experienced a significant amount of it, despite my choosing not to.
What I have never previously experienced is doing anything about it other than forgiving the bastards, feeling like shit and accruing trauma to the point of having become dysfunctional. I am not entirely sure the official diagnosis of high functioning autism is correct. I believe I am a high functioning person who has a lifetime of unresolved cPTSD, which has finally caught up with me to the point where my body is forced to rest by it literally breaking down and becoming dysfunctional. The theory from experience is that trauma causes both autism and fibromyalgia. Meanwhile, I need to keep my mind active before it stagnates. Reading is good for that, until eye-strain. Writing a few genre-specific novels, drawing from personal experience, is something toward that. It's also therapeutic.
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Structure: false accusation → long imprisonment and transformation → empowered return under a new name → systematic, knowledge-based ruin of the guilty → partial restoration or acceptance of remaining limits.
The Three Musketeers / The Man in the Iron Mask (Dumas)
Structure: conspiracy or state injustice → imprisonment or threat → alliance and counter-intrigue → exposure and decisive action against the principal agent.
The Black Tulip (Dumas)
Structure: false political accusation → imprisonment and patient craft → public demonstration of excellence that forces the truth into the open → vindication.
The Cask of Amontillado (Poe)
Structure: accumulated grievance → cold, meticulous premeditation → isolated, irreversible act of burial → silence and impunity. Pure wilful revenge with no higher court.
The Black Cat (Poe)
Structure: escalating sadism → attempt to conceal → inevitable exposure by the very thing that was abused. Karma or nature, not the victim’s agency, completes the revenge.
Wuthering Heights (Brontë)
Structure: social and emotional exclusion → acquisition of power → multi-generational economic and emotional destruction of the offending families → consumption of the avenger himself by the same forces.
The Moonstone
Structure: colonial or possessive theft → long concealment and investigation → rightful reclamation by the original stewards → public unmasking of the thieves’ characters.
Moby-Dick (Melville)
Structure: Ahab loses a leg to the white whale and makes its destruction the sole purpose of his life and command. The pursuit destroys the ship and most of the crew. Structure: traumatic wound by an inscrutable force → monomaniacal identification of that force as the enemy → total mobilisation of others → mutual annihilation. Revenge as self-consuming obsession against nature or fate.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Hugo)
Structure: societal and personal cruelty toward the outcast → single act of kindness → absolute loyalty and sacrificial defence → public revelation of the true moral monsters.
Captain Blood (Sabatini)
Structure: unjust legal condemnation and enslavement → acquisition of maritime skill and independent power → targeted action against the specific oppressors and the system → eventual political vindication and restoration of status.
Universal pattern in these 19th-century classics
Across the set the recurring spine is:
Initiating injustice – false accusation, social exclusion, betrayal, physical harm, or institutional abuse that leaves the protagonist powerless, imprisoned, or stripped of name and standing.
Period of enforced transformation – isolation, suffering, or hidden labour during which knowledge, skill, wealth, or clarity is acquired.
Emergence with new means – return under a new identity, with money, allies, technical mastery, or simply the decision to speak.
Poetic or systemic confrontation – the original wrongdoers are met with consequences that mirror their methods (exposure, economic ruin, social disgrace, imprisonment, or the simple public record of what they did). Collateral damage and moral cost are common.
Larger order affirmed or questioned – the narrative either restores a sense of natural/social justice or shows the avenger consumed by the same forces, leaving the reader with the evidence rather than pure triumph.
The instrument of revenge is rarely the sword alone; it is information, narrative, public demonstration, or the slow working of consequence.
Comparing against the Universal Pattern, especially of 'Initial Injustice' and 'Period of Forced Transformation', my life story is ticking almost every box. My 'Emergence with new means' is simply the decision to speak up about it. The alternative is bed-rotting and wallowing in misery.
Using that pattern as the spine of the SnakeAppleTree novel(s)
The novels about SnakeAppleTree can sit directly on this spine while making the form of revenge deliberately non-violent and documentary:
Initiating injustice: Multiple, apparently unrelated groups (social, institutional, personal, online or local) repeatedly select the same target. Each episode is framed by its perpetrators as isolated, justified, or hearsay-based. The target experiences cumulative damage to emotional stability, mental health, social standing, economic position and reputation. Authorities consistently decline to connect the incidents or act, effectively siding with the abusers. The protagonist cannot prove the backstage networking that links the groups, yet experiences the pattern as continuous.
Period of transformation: The long accumulation of the lived record itself—notes, dates, effects on body, mind, work and relationships—functions as the “imprisonment and labour.” Writing becomes the hidden craft, analogous to the black tulip or the Count’s studies.
Emergence with new means: The decision to publish the novel (and the planned series) is the return. No new fortune or sword is required; the instrument is the public narrative that places the sequence of events, the emotional and material consequences, and the observable pattern of selection and denial into one document.
Confrontation: The “poetic justice” is social and evidentiary. In a community split between those who use hearsay to dehumanise a chosen target and those willing to examine primary accounts, the novel supplies the primary account. It does not need to name every individual in legally actionable form; it needs to make the structure of repeated targeting, the networking façade of “unrelated incidents,” and the institutional refusal to see the pattern visible. Readers who already operate by hearsay will reject it; readers who can see through coordinated dehumanisation will recognise the shape. That recognition is the exposure.
Multiplicity and interconnection: Because several distinct clusters of abusers have operated against the same person, the material naturally divides into a sequence of novels (or tightly linked volumes). Each volume can follow one cluster or one period while the overarching series shows how the separate façades interlock, how damage from one episode lowered defences for the next, and how the authorities’ consistent non-response functioned as a common enabling condition. The cumulative effect across the series is the full Count-of-Monte-Cristo-style revelation of the system, achieved solely by the sustained telling.
Moral and formal stance: Following the classics, the work can acknowledge cost (the ongoing toll on the narrator, the risk of further targeting, the incompleteness of any single account) while insisting that the act of accurate public narration is itself the restoration of agency and the only available form of social justice when formal institutions decline to act.
This keeps the classic structure intact, substitutes publication and pattern-exposure for sword or fortune, and accommodates the real multiplicity of storylines without forcing them into a single artificial conspiracy. The series becomes both the record of what happened and the instrument that makes the pattern legible to anyone willing to read past the hearsay.