Lazarus One: Why Magic Systems Are Important… Even With No Magic

In a recent quest to relax after a busy show season, my husband and I booked our Sunday for a cocoa-infused, blanket-wrapped, snuggly Halloween movie marathon. But as we turned on our streamer, Prime suggested Harlan Coben’s Lazarus. We love watching Sam Claflin and Bill Nighy, so I clicked to see if it was something we wanted to check out later.

We binged the whole thing right then and there.

The opening was that compelling.

It started right in the thick of it. A deranged inmate makes oddly specific, supernatural threats. Someone dies offsite within moments, proving his far-reaching karmic powers. And a life fueled by guilt-laden coping mechanisms shifts instantly into the fraying desperation of finding answers.

You can see how gripping it was from the start. Coben absolutely nailed the suspense and intrigue factors. I’m not sure I’ve been that invested in a show since 24 with Kiefer Sutherland (another actor-favorite of mine).

Now, I haven’t read anything by Harlan Coben, but it turns out Lazarus wasn’t one of his novels to begin with. He created the miniseries for television and, if you ask me, for the cast, too. They embodied their roles!

But—and I may be revealing my complete ignorance of the behind-the-scenes world of television here—I do wonder whether it might have had a stronger build and finish if it had been a novel first. (Again, I have no history with Coben; I’m just giving him the benefit of the doubt. He is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, after all.)

I am obviously divulging my uneducated bias toward written source material, but I know the in-depth process that writing novels requires, and I do wonder whether the same process is regularly (emphasis: more often than not) implemented in the creation of television series. We see so many fall flat at the end—even those derived from solid sources—and it really makes me question the process. Especially since that process is subject to so many more moving parts, including a budget, which author imaginations need not heed in the ink-and-paper business…!

Now, I won’t say Lazarus fell flat. I honestly still recommend watching it—preferably before you read this blog… as long as you’ll come back to this later!—because the ride is so much fun!

Despite everything it did right (and the list is almost incomprehensible—it is clear Coben is a master), the miniseries didn’t handle a few things the way I think a good story should, and as a writer of stories, I found a couple of excellent cross-media learning opportunities that deserve consideration.

Rather than inundate my readers with a long Mufasa-length blog, I thought I’d do a miniseries of my own, covering each of the elements that needed a bit more care in separate entries.

This first one speaks to the importance of establishing a system of rules that govern a story’s more nebulous inner-workings.

From the paltry research I’ve conducted, I understand that Lazarus was supposed to be a one-off miniseries that tied everything up neatly without need of a sequel season. I’m afraid that—despite how close it came to enthralling perfection—it didn’t quite succeed on that front.

The single biggest issue with Lazarus was a lack of cohesive rule structure for the preternatural goings-on in the story.

I can best relate this to my favorite genre. If you’re a regular reader of fantasy, you know the importance of a well-devised magic system.

Consistent magical rules…

• • better immerse readers through believable and comprehensible world-building (we mortals know what to expect from our rules of physics, right?)
  • create predictable limitations for the use of magic (and how the characters may wield it for or against each other)
  • clarify the stakes of the story through those limitations (because you can see what is and isn’t possible in the world and how that may affect the characters in it)

Think of it like a rollercoaster. You may not know what twists and turns lie over that ridge ahead, but you can rest assured that the cart will stay on a set track, wherever it goes (or so you hope!).

But if the car suddenly disconnected, flew calmly off the tracks to zip around the theme park before dropping you off in the parking lot, and then failed to reanimate to return to the tracks whence it came, you’d wonder why. Like, a lot of whys.

• • Why did it jump off the tracks?
  • Why was it able to fly on its own?
  • Why did it drop me off here?
  • Why can’t it fly—or even roll—back to the park?

Readers of any genre don’t particularly care for a bunch of open-ended questions that promise no explanation (or “pay-off”). Fantasy and magic aren’t alone in requiring explicit processes for the way things work. Science (or speculative) fiction and paranormal stories require similar framework. If you, as an imbiber of the medium, can’t understand why something is happening or whether it might (or might not) happen again, the story will cease to be immersive because you’ll just sit there asking questions about things that feel arbitrary instead of planned.

*Spoilers and discussion of sensitive subject matter (murder and suicide) begin here.*

It turns out psychological thrillers need such systems, too. In Lazarus, Joel “Laz” Lazarus, a forensic psychiatrist, learns his father, also a psychiatrist, has committed suicide in his office. Although the family remains plagued by the murder of Laz’s little sister twenty-five years ago, none of them became the suicidal type, and the baffling loss sends Laz to his father’s office to try to make sense of the situation.

Exhausted by grief and confusion, he is accosted by the ghost of one of his father’s former patients, who seems stuck in a reenactment of her clinical session with his father. Unable to question her freely, Laz realizes that he can only approximate his father’s studied replies to learn whatever he can about her within the lived script of their session. When she disappears, he begins rummaging through his father’s patient records, convinced that a dastardly cover-up connects the mounting deaths.

***QUICK DIVERSION***

You might be asking* why Laz even tried to interact with the auto-pilot ghost, and for a moment or two, it may look like nothing more than a dual-purpose device used to make the conversation more sensible to viewers and give us the impression that Laz knows his father very, very well (nicely done, Coben). But! It turns out, this also calls into question something we learn later, so just sit with that one for a moment.

*However: if you’re an author and failed to ask this question, you are still in the first-draft phase of your understanding of this work—and that’s okay, especially if you’ve seen it (less than) once. But when you hit editing mode in a later draft, you should begin thinking from the reader’s POV and asking yourself, “Would my reader question this?” If so, you need to deal with it appropriately. This could mean…

• • giving readers the answer to that question then and there (non-mysterious information becomes an instant pay-off for your readers)
  • bringing that back up to answer later (create a little suspense now until there is an appropriate time or revelation to return to this quirky choice)
  • having a character ask—perhaps internally or in later dialogue—why he bothered (create the inciting moment that begs the question either as something that can be answered right then or that will need to be investigated)

You get the idea. It’s your job as the author to mete out information to the readers in a way that makes them feel like they’re actively uncovering things rather than being led by the nose, constantly in the dark, throughout your story. This was a novice oopsie I made in early versions of An Heir of Realms, an epic fantasy novel filled with mysteries and misleading information, and I’ve striven to avoid this trap ever since my betas—rightly!—raked me over the coals for it.

***END DIVERSION***

Anywho! Returning to the office some time later, Laz is visited not by the spectral woman but by his father’s ghost. The caveat? His father can interact with him. He is not stuck in an unalterable loop of lived experience but can answer questions and speak to his son as if he were not dead. His father explains that Laz will be visited by the spirits of his patients, à la Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and it is Laz’s job to uncover the truth behind their murders—his included. (Duh duh duhhhhhh!)

Even if we accept that his father’s ghost has special privileges (presumably) by virtue of his connection to Laz and his non-patient status, we as viewers are forced to question why—or whether—Laz is even experiencing these otherworldly visitations.

• • Are these truly apparitions, caught in the web of time, forced to relive the experiences that led to their deaths for Laz’s viewing displeasure?
  • If his father’s ghost is more sentient, why can’t he tell us who killed him and made it look like suicide? What are his limitations, compared to those of the other scripted victims?
  • Is his father’s knowledge limited because Laz is simply hallucinating him, so he can only know what Laz knows?
  • If Laz is hallucinating, how can he possibly know what happened to patients behind his father’s closed doors?

These kinds of intriguing mysteries are what draw the viewer (or reader) in, and Coben layered them in artfully. Now, as the story unfolds, building on this system will be what enhances its immersiveness.

Whenever Laz is forced to play out a new ghost’s story, he recognizes that the person was murdered—because that’s what his father-ghost told him.

So, when someone he recently saw, alive and well in his sister’s kitchen, arrives—younger and engrossed in a past conversation—in his father’s office, Laz (and the viewer) knows she must have died since last he spoke with her.

This follows the pattern established by the rules set out in earlier episodes. When we see her arrive in the same trance as the other ghosts, we’re as alarmed as Laz is… because, like him, we know this means she has been murdered.

Our ability to infer, as Laz does, what happened to the character from her eldritch presence is what gives us agency as readers or viewers. We feel like we are a part of the story because we understand the system governing it, and rather than ruin the suspense, the predictability enhances it. We know she’s dead, but now we want to know why because the reveal was such an understandable surprise.

However, issues arise when the rules inexplicably change. Laz only sees the ghosts of his father and other murder victims… right?

So, what does it mean when he sees the ghost of his younger self?

The scene where a teenaged Laz approaches his father and begs forgiveness for not saving his sister from being murdered is made horribly poignant by Laz’s enforced role as his cold and unforgiving father. He knows both sides of the conversation by heart, haunted by its brutality since it transpired, but now, occupying his father’s side as he watches his young heart break at his words, he is forced to relive it in the cruelest way possible.

This scene was genius, and it killed me—just like it was supposed to. (Bravo, Coben!)

Unfortunately, I was a bit distracted by the broken rules.

Laz is seeing himself.

• • Does that mean he’s dead now?
  • Or has he been dead all along?
  • Is this less hallucination and more post-mortem hellscape?

When all returns to normal in the next scene, and he seems alive and not terribly well, we are left wondering what in the realm just happened.

• • If he is alive, and no other conditions changed in the rules system, how did he see his past self?
  • Is this simply a metaphor for the death of his innocence, youth, or relationship with his father?
  • Are these scenes not enacted by ghosts but visions Laz experiences in his father’s office?

Suddenly, the entire rules system is called into question, our understanding shattered by a non-sequitur change. What’s worse, an artful scene that should bring us to our knees in empathy for Laz is disengaged by questions about what is transpiring. (Sure, I’m an empath, and I was able to suspend disbelief while this heartrending scene unfolded. It also reminded me of a less-haunting (pun intended) but similar scene I recently wrote in the upcoming D’Erenellean prequel “epic novella” to the Realm Riders Series, and the author in me loved watching the mechanics of it play out. But as soon as it was over, my Virgo brain shifted into analytical mode.)

Now, Coben could have rectified this by allowing an earlier, less emotional, non-sequitur encounter to change the rules for us. When Laz engages in a conversation that his father had with his sister right before she died, we realize that not all the ghosts are his patients. This was a good first step in shifting the rules.

But if we could have also witnessed a past scene with someone who was still alive in present-day before Laz sees his younger self, we would realize that not all the ghostly memories belong to the dead. After Laz has analyzed this change (and perhaps explained it to another character, like his sister) to ensure viewers also understand this evolved rule of connection, then we could feel immersed in the scene between his teenaged self and his father because we are not asking what seeing it really means.

And this problem isn’t resolved because by the end of the series, we still don’t fully understand how Laz sees what he does in his father’s office.

Remember my earlier diversion in this blog, when I questioned Laz’s involvement in the ghost-patients’ pre-scripted conversations from lived sessions with his father? Eventually, we are reminded of a possible explanation with a replay of an earlier scene that we—by design—thought nothing of (sneaky, Coben!). We know his father recorded everything that happened within those four walls, and Laz has been listening to the tapes back at his sister’s house, often falling asleep while they play in his headset.

Given his vision of his own past, it seems unlikely that he actually encountered ghosts replaying these scenes before his very eyes. Instead:

• • It is possible that he just happened to pull the tape of a murdered patient, heard the session in his sleep, and relived it in full, grief-hallucinated technicolor when it resurfaced to his conscious brain as he walked into his father’s workspace. This, perhaps along with his deep understanding of his father, would explain how he knew what his father’s side of the conversation entailed.
  • It is possible that the same thing recurred after he dozed while listening to other tapes of murder victims and family discussions.

But there’s a hitch in this theory. If you’ll remember, Laz realized that a person in his life died because of the timing of one of these visitations. This leaves us wondering whether that was mere coincidence… or something more supernatural, the latter of which would blow up our tape-recording theory. In fact, no one theory seems to cover it all, and it cheapens the “rules,” relegating them to convenient plot devices that can shift with momentary need.

Sure, maybe I missed something, or I’m just not smart enough to read the subtext—but if so, I’ll bet I’m not the only one, and that feels like sloppy execution to me (no murder pun intended). I want my readers to understand what I’m trying to share with them—to share in the revelations rather than in the confusion. Subtext is great, but when the main plot device becomes subtext—or worse yet, inconsistent subtext—we have a problem.

Just remember, authors: mystery is important, but if you never give the reader any answers, they won’t thank you for leaving them with as many questions as they had when they picked up your book to discover what it held within its pages.

-HA

Coben’s tendency to abuse plot devices in Lazarus also extended to his characters. Find out more in the next entry, “Lazarus Two: Don’t Hold Your Characters at Plot Point.”