About this work

About the Author

On this work

The Mantis exists in three voices simultaneously. It’s told through blogs. It has comments and timelines and multiple reading paths.

But let me be clear: this is a book.

I’ve become obsessed with the question of how form shapes meaning. A story told in a novel is one thing. The same story told through three simultaneous blog entries is something else entirely. The medium doesn’t just carry the message—it is part of the message.

The blog format creates something a traditional novel cannot: the sense that these three narratives are happening at the same time, without one narrator knowing what the others are writing. It creates gaps. It creates contradiction. It creates the possibility that there is no single truth, only three versions of the same events.

That’s what I wanted. So I built it that way.

But it’s still a book. It still has structure. It still has an arc. It still tells a story with beginning, middle, and end. It just refuses to tell you the story in the easiest, most linear way.

On multimedia storytelling

I’ve spent years exploring how stories can exist across different mediums. How a narrative can be told through archives, through fragments, through competing voices, through different forms of presentation.

The Mantis is part of that obsession.

But I also believe that no matter what medium you use, no matter how experimental the form, you’re still fundamentally trying to do the same thing: tell a story that matters. Explore something true about human nature. Make someone understand something they didn’t understand before.

Form is not an excuse. Form is a tool. And like any tool, it only works if it serves the story.

With The Mantis, the three-blog structure serves the story because the story is about three people who can’t see each other, who misunderstand each other, who are trapped in their own narratives. The form mirrors the content. That’s when multimedia storytelling works.

On performance

I think we’re all performing all the time. We perform at work, in relationships, on social media, even in our diaries. We perform different versions of ourselves for different audiences. Sometimes we perform so convincingly that we forget it’s a performance.

The Mantis is a story about that. Three people, all performing versions of themselves, all believing their performance is real, all unable to see that the person they think they love or hate is also performing.

That’s universal. That’s true. And it matters.

Other works

If you’re interested in multimedia storytelling, narrative experimentation, and the fiction of institutional authority, you might find these other projects worth exploring:

Blackthorn Preservation — A fake preservation trust for a Victorian estate. Complete with academic apparatus, archival materials, and the careful pretense of institutional legitimacy. Explores how authority is constructed through form, how history is mediated through archives, and what happens when the archive itself becomes fiction.

Blood and Bone — The speculative physiology of the vampire. A study in inherited trauma, blood obligation, and what we pass down through the body.

Memoirs of the Eternal Present — Archive — An archive. External index. The question of concurrent time—when multiple incompatible sequences can exist in the same moment, and how we document that impossibility.

Each one is an attempt to find the right form for a particular story. Each one is an obsession with how medium shapes meaning.

On The Mantis specifically

This story came from somewhere deep. I’m not sure where. It came from observing people, from understanding obsession, from watching how easily we lie to ourselves and how convincingly we perform for others.

I wanted to write something that had no easy answers. No clear heroes or villains. No redemption arc or lesson learned. Just three people, trapped in their own narratives, systematically misunderstanding each other.

I wanted the form to reflect that confusion. So I gave each one their own voice, their own blog, their own version of the truth.

And then I let them collide.

The story that emerges is not mine anymore. It’s the space between their narratives. It’s what you discover reading from multiple angles. It’s the gaps.

That’s the book.

A final note

Read this however you want. Read it all at once. Read Mario’s perspective first. Start with the timeline. Jump to the middle. Follow Simona’s thread through the entire work.

The story holds up no matter how you approach it, because the truth isn’t in the linear progression of events. The truth is in the contradictions. The truth is in what they don’t say. The truth is in the distance between what they claim and what they do.

That’s always where the truth is.

Thank you for reading.

— Luigi Pascal Rondanini