A man with a slide carousel once put a single heavy-metal album cover of a scantily clad woman in chains on a parish-hall screen and left it there for five whole minutes, explaining square inch by square inch why no Christian teenager should ever look at it. Scott Zachary has spent thirty-five years wondering whether that man knew he was the most effective promoter of heavy metal in Eau Claire County, and he carries the question into “A Moste Terrible and Trve Discoverie,” the 16th-century facsimile pamphlet set inside Ryan Williamson’s latest novel, “The Stygian Blades.” Seven fugitives, one woodcut, five pounds sterling living or dead, and a brothel in ashes, all printed under a title that warns modest wives and chaste daughters to stop their ears.

My novel Doors to the Stars hits the commercial three-act marks precisely — act break at 22, identity reversal at 50, dark night of the soul at 75. But underneath that entirely orthodox frame it’s running a four-act structure with no conflict in it, an episodic middle that never escalates, a protagonist whose want changes five times (with the first one dead by chapter four), an antagonist that’s an inanimate object, and a named villain who’s never defeated. And it works. This essay takes the frame off the book: kishōtenketsu, Lazarillo de Tormes, and what happens to a prop when you give it a will.