Kids looking for a good scare are in for a treat in SKELETON CREEK, a novel by Patrick Carman that’s quite, well, novel. It’s an exercise in multimedia, requiring readers to access exclusive web videos to get the whole story — no doubt a shrewd move to attract new generations to the printed page, and hopefully one that works.
The slim read is structured like a journal, right down to lines on the page and a typeface to replicate all-caps handwriting. Penning this diary is Ryan, a teenager who’s been grounded and confined to his room after breaking his leg in a mishap in an abandoned dredge on the outskirts of town — an accident that’s left him with an inexplicable case of amnesia.
While Ryan may be under lock and key, his best friend Sarah is not. At night, under the shared assumption that something sinister is afoot, she goes out and investigates the dredge, camcorder in hand, to find out just what’s up with that place. She captures surprising footage, which she uploads to the ‘net for Ryan to see as they delve deeper into the mystery. At this point — every 20 or 30 pages or so — a password appears for www.sarahfincher.com; readers then can plug those in at the site to see the vids.
The shorts are extremely well-produced and deliver some eerie, BLAIR WITCH-style jolts. I don’t care if you’re 14 or 40 — there are a few images that are incredibly creepy. While Carman does a credible job planting the seeds of his mystery and building doubt on the pages, its purpose is generally to tease; it’s the web component that shoulders the task of delivering the payoffs. There’s nothing wrong with that … assuming the site will still be up should SKELETON CREEK be picked up years from now by new hands. —Rod Lott
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The name for this new genre is called interactive fiction. It sprang out of Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). And it just may be the wave of a new future of publishing.
Mel, there’s about a 25-year tradition of using the term “interactive fiction” to apply to text-parser games (like “Zork”), though there are certainly more ways of being interactive than typing “light lamp” and “attack dwarf.”