Hello all,
I looking for some assistance in assembling a literary puzzle. I need to gleam one powerful recurring character from various literary great works. The character has to be sinister (which can manifest itself in a variety of personalities) and implied, rather than explicit. So, for example, there might be an Old Testament figure --- however major or minor --- who could be considered to have made an appearance in several of the works of Dickens and, later one of Aldous Huxley's Brief Candles short stories; but in a different guise every time. Whether by the intention of the authors or not.
If any of you have read London: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd you'll have a good idea of what I'm getting at. He draws seemingly tenuous parallels between events and features of London from all of its history, in order to tease out a deep, dark and sometimes unsettling caricature of the place.
The idea behind the puzzle is still embryonic, so I hope you'll forgive me not explaining it in full at this moment. Suffice to say it is an Interactive Fiction piece where the the character has to be rediscovered from works of literature by the player. It is therefore quite important that the character isn't something immediately obvious, such as the Devil or Lady Macbeth.
Thanks,
EM