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"A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window." 

(Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? 1991)

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Since no one writes like Lafferty, these are temporary engines of war, a way to push beyond saying that this man does not write like other people.

 

Bloodsmell: The metaphysical presence of spilled blood in Lafferty’s fiction, where violence is never mere spectacle but always signifies—justice or mercy, judgment or redemption, punishment or sacrifice. Blood in Lafferty’s world insists on meaning, drawing from biblical and sacramental traditions in which suffering is either merited and redemptive or unmerited and damning. The bloodsmell is the inescapable scent of these metaphysical realities.

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Compensatory Fabulation: A narrative strategy that deliberately employs flat characters—usually considered literary weaknesses—and transforms them into strengths through inventive storytelling, allusive depth, and intricate narrative concealment. In R. A. Lafferty’s fiction, this technique allows for unique effects by shifting narrative complexity away from character psychology and toward sophisticated literary games, clever emplotment, destabilized genre conventions, theological depth, and logogriphs, thus compensating for the absence of rounded, psychologically intricate characterization.

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Difficulty vs. Excess: Lafferty’s works are not excessive in the sense of overflowing, uncontainable meaning; rather, they are deliberately difficult, structured as puzzles demanding effort to solve. His fiction takes place within a sacramental framework where meaning is not arbitrary but embedded in in his view of spiritual reality. Treating his complexity as excess risks flattening his art into chaotic play rather than the challenge he intends. Understanding Lafferty requires engagement, precision, and a willingness to wrestle with his riddles.

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Deflected Attention: Lafferty often plays with misplaced focus, where characters (and readers) fixate on the wrong details. Instead of seeing the deeper reality, they become absorbed in spectacle, trivialities, or over-analysis. His fiction critiques this habit, urging a shift in perception toward what truly matters.

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Depth Camouflage: Lafferty’s stories disguise profound ideas beneath playful surfaces. What seems like whimsy, satire, or tall tale often conceals deep metaphysical, theological, or philosophical structures, rewarding those who look beyond the obvious

 

Expressive Fragmentation: Lafferty’s prose relies on syntactic symbolism, where short, fractured sentences mirror thematic concerns such as uncertainty, identity shifts, and temporal instability. These intentional breaks control pacing, direct reader focus, and intensify philosophical or poetic moments. Rather than merely "telling," his fragmented syntax enacts meaning, making his style both economical and symbolically charged.

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Ghost Story: Lafferty wrote that his total production is “one very very long novel … a ghost story that is also a jigsaw puzzle. And the mark of my ghost story is that there is a deep underlay that has never attained clear visibility, never attained clear publication.”

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Gold of Story: Lafferty refines myth, history, and philosophy into a higher form—what he calls the “Christ gold.” Like Augustine’s “plundering the gold of Egypt,” his work extracts truth from tradition while warning against mistaking mere glitter for the real thing. His stories demand discernment: to see what is true, what is dross, and what risks becoming an idol. His nonfiction insistently asks that readers seek the gold of story.

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Iconographic Insetting: Lafferty's inclusion of short anecdotes or images early in a story, not as decoration but as a compacted key to the narrative’s architecture. Beginning as static description, this icon expands in significance as the story progresses, moving from motif to organizing principle. Somewhat like a blend of metonymy and iconicity, iconographic insetting condenses crucial information within a single moment, only to reveal its meaning on close re-reading. This technique works not only within individual works but across Lafferty’s larger body of fiction, forming hidden intertextual ties that hold together the underlying cohesion of his Ghost Story.

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Logogriphic Play: Lafferty’s prose crackles with linguistic mischief and etymological play, inventing, reviving, and twisting words into strange delights. His use of hapax legomena—words appearing only once—turns language itself into a puzzle, making his fiction not just a story to follow but a game to decipher. When readers encounter a linguistic oddity in Lafferty, it is an invitation to consider logogriphic play.

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Monads: Lafferty’s fiction is a vast, interconnected whole, with recurring elements that subtly reveal an underlying structure—what he called the “underlay.” We can think of his primary units of composition as monads, reflecting different degrees of perception and awareness. Some merely hint at the hidden order, while others actively reveal it. This ghostly circulation and transposition of ideas across his works suggest a coherent, yet elusive, deeper reality beneath his storytelling.

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The Principle of Keeping Count: Lafferty’s work is meticulously structured, with numerical patterns forming a crucial part of his storytelling architecture. Seemingly minor numerical details—such as the patterns of threes and nine in Past Master—are not arbitrary but reinforce deeper thematic and structural connections. Overlooking these patterns distorts the meaning of his work and risks reducing him to a whimsical storyteller rather than the literary architect he truly is.

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Rationalized Mystery: Lafferty frequently highlights the human tendency to impose rational explanations on the inexplicable. When faced with the supernatural, many of his characters want neat, materialist answers—even if they don’t hold up. His work texposes this impulse as both comic and tragic, showing that that Mystery cannot be tamed by logic.

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Redemptive World-Building: Lafferty insists that true creation must acknowledge the Incarnation as its foundation. For him, leaving out Redemption doesn’t just weaken a world—it renders it hollow. His vision rejects neutral storytelling; instead, all meaningful subcreation must align with the “real shape of history” to avoid becoming a “screaming void.”

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Sacramental Poesis: Lafferty’s fiction is anchored in a deeply ordered vision of reality, rooted in Scholastic metaphysics. Creation follows a divine pattern—distinction, adornment, and fulfillment—where everything participates in being according to its ontological weight. His characters and worlds are not psychological constructs but mirrors of reality’s hierarchy. Storytelling, for Lafferty, is not mere invention but a participation in divine creativity, moving toward an ultimate end.

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Sliding Scale of Allegory: Lafferty employs a dynamic range of allegorical techniques, from structured continuous allegory—where symbols directly shape plot logic—to freer, more elusive forms that resist fixed interpretation. This sliding scale allows him to encode propositional truths while simultaneously gesturing toward deeper, anagogical realities. His allegories are neither rigid nor haphazard but deliberately calibrated to challenge, misdirect, and ultimately reveal hidden dimensions of meaning within his fiction.

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Supernatural Remainder: Some truths resist explanation. Lafferty’s storytelling often leaves behind an irreducible element—a presence that lingers beyond resolution. This remainder invites contemplation rather than closure, challenging readers to see beyond the limits of reason.

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Theotropic Dissonance: Lafferty’s storytelling pulls readers toward the divine (theotropic) while deliberately troubling allegorical simplicity (its dissonance). At its best, this technique elevates prophecy into eschatology, reshaping typology into active judgment. But when flat historical allegory dominates, the visionary force is constrained—its mystical power flattened by immediate critique.

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Worlds with a Center: For Lafferty, successful world-building isn’t limitless invention. It must be anchored in the Incarnation—the “only valid environment.” Without it, a world is not just incomplete but a void. His artistic vision rejects pure creative freedom in favor of a mystical but ordered cosmos, where storytelling must enfigure the shape of sacred history, or become hollow.

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Zoon Anthropikon: Lafferty’s fiction often depicts humanity not as a rational or political animal but as something more layered, an entity bound to both the animal world and a higher order of being. He writes as if human nature carries within it remnants of an older and more inclusive state, where animals were not separate from human consciousness but part of it. This lost condition lingers as both loss and possibility, and it surfaces in places where reason alone proves insufficient.