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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45296
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

This is a fascinating question and I agree with the main response: to explain something like that, you probably need to introduce the mechanism earlier rather than later.

You left it ambiguous whether you were talking about a serial that’s already published, or a draft sent out to test-readers. The advice to revise the draft is extremely good if you are in the latter case. But I also wanted to contribute an answer if you are in the former case, and you cannot change what you have already published.

So what is _wrong_ with the explanation (to quote the main answer) “Aha, Bob was drugged with rage oil!” and why does this lose the respect of your readers? The essential problem is that you would be relieving _too much tension, too fast_. Similarly the way that you lost their respect earlier was that you _created_ too much tension, too fast. Tension is a difficult quantity in narrative, we crave the _delectatio morosa_ as it is created and we love a sudden release of it at an appropriate _catharsis_, but there is a distinction to be made about the _tension inside the story_ (as experienced by its characters and plot) and a _tension of the reader_ who is reading the story. If the tension inside the story changes too rapidly, the reader’s tension does not follow along.

Accordingly your readers have not built as much tension as the story presently has, and to release all of that tension seems lame and uninspired rather than cathartic. So you now need to build a slow build-up of tension to the dramatic reveal. What does that look like?

Well, you need to introduce the rage oil: and the sooner, the better. I would assume you want to start right now. Maybe someone _tells_ Bob,“you know what this is, right? This is textbook rage oil poisoning. That is the only explanation.” and we get a flashback to some time when Bob encountered the rage oil, possibly when he was previously drugged with it.

By itself that has no real tension and if Bob wholeheartedly agrees it in fact creates the above problem of _relieving_ all the tension. So, Bob doesn’t agree. “I have _had_ rage oil,” he says, “and this was not that. This was different. My palms weren’t sweaty, my heart wasn’t racing, I was collected and focused. That is what scares me: because I know what rage oil feels like, and I can tell you that this was all me.”

Now there is an interesting question. Bob appears to have had the rage oil equivalent of an _acid flashback_, an experience where a psychoactive drug has damaged the brain enough that one has a drug-experience long after the drug has left their system. What did he do in the past life? How did he avoid punishments? Has this happened before? Are there other experiences that Bob can describe for us from the plot we know, where he can tell us how hard it was to keep that anger in check, but now he just _lost it_ and started killing people? What is the troubled backstory which we are missing?

Maybe Bob starts to take some _calm herb_ to try and protect himself. Maybe we find out later that our betrayer who poisoned Bob actually knows that calm herb does not stop rage oil’s rage-effect, only its nasty physiological side-effects: allowing a malicious person to up the dosage and provide _even more rage_. So maybe the betrayer actually laced the rage oil with calm herb, to make it _more_ effective, and that’s all why Bob thought that this wasn’t rage oil. He had only had the “unrefined” experience and now he was given the “real deal.”

There are obviously a lot of variations here. But the point of them I hope is clear: you've got a pot that is boiling out of control, and it needs to be put onto a back burner to simmer with all of the herbs and spices that will make it good in the end.

Original score: 3