Oh, that Ms. Book Whore certainly is a slutty one, isn’t she? Leading you by the hand up and down the new release aisles, just trying to coerce you to part with every last dime?
This week, she asks, “You like to watch?” and you answer “Yes,” and she shows you DESPERATE NETWORKS, by THE LATE SHIFT‘s Bill Carter, chronicling a year of decisionmaking both smart and stupid at the big bad TV webs. One of those shows during that year was LOST. That worked. So much so that it now spawns its own novel, BAD TWIN, supposedly written by “Gary Troup,” one of the entirely fictional series’ plane-crash corpses. (In other words, it’s a total gimmick … that’ll move like the proverbial hotcakes.) Another show that worked was DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, which somehow resulted in star Teri Hatcher getting a book deal for her views on life and love, BURNT TOAST AND OTHER PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE. “Seriously?” you ask. “Yes,” coos Ms. Book Whore. “You’ve just gotta read the part about getting felt up by the robot guy from T2 in THE COOL SURFACE.”
“Does she really?” you ask. But Ms. Book Whore simply winks and replies in a whisper, “It’s a mystery.”
You think that had to be a planned segueway, because she begins pushing mystery paperback after mystery paperback into your eager hands: Richard Doetsch’s Vatican thriller THE THIEVES OF HEAVEN, Robert Goddard’s theatre-set whodunit PLAY TO THE END, Åsa Larsson’s Swedish procedural SUN STORM, Linwood Barclay’s comic caper BAD GUYS and even Dean Koontz’s bestselling VELOCITY.
“Oh, yeah, VELOCITY,” you say. “Those guys over at BOOKGASM really liked that one. I hear they’ll be reviewing THIEVES OF HEAVEN soon, too.” But she appears not to care.
Instead, she traipses over to horror and shoves David Wellington’s zombie novel MONSTER ISLAND and Paul Witcover’s DRACULA: ASYLUM, an authorized-by-Universal tale of cinema’s most famous vampire.
“Hey, wait,” you say. “These two have been out for a couple of weeks. They’re old.”
“And so am I!” she yells, baring her fangs and plunging them deep into your neck, draining you of blood and killing you.
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The interesting thing about this LOST novel is that it hasn’t even been a part of the show at this point. I think we saw Hurley reading the manuscript, but otherwise, unless it becomes a huge part of the final few episodes of the season, I don’t get the point of it all. Other than to make money off of sucker LOST fans, of course.
Monster Island started as a free Internet book, and its popularity eventually got the author a book deal. It starts off really strong, and then slowly devolves as cool zombie fiction slowly devolves into the mainstay of the fan-fiction-type genre writer: Celtic mysticism. *shiver*
Not bad for a first-timer, though. The book (and sequels, are here
LOST/BAD TWIN: I just read that Gary Troup is an anagram for “purgatory.” Ooh, spooky!
MONSTER ISLAND: I can’t read long stuff online, even if it is free. I liked Wellington’s book in the BRAINCHILD and THE UNDEAD anthologies, both of which are reviewed here.
Well, Sawyer was seen reading it last night (when Jack burned the last pages all I could think was “What a jerk.” I don’t care if you do need his guns, there’s still no need to burn the last few pages of a whodunit.) but they’ve still given LOST viewers no reason to actually want to read it.