"Conventional publishers: read and weep." - Paula Brook, Vancouver Sun
Hooked on an e-taleThe Vancouver Sun
By Paula Brook
Usually it takes me a few weeks to start breaking my New Year's resolutions, but this year I broke three on the very day I made them. Resolved: to stop compulsively checking my e-mail; to turn off the incoming ping; and (the perennial resolution, going on 20 years now) to spend more time with my family.
This year I'm blaming The Daughters of Freya - a serialized e-mail mystery I subscribed to just before Christmas. It kept my inbox full and pinging right through the holidays, making mincemeat of my best intentions.
I got hooked - but in a good way. Not unlike the way Victorian readers were kept painfully dangling between each serialized chapter of epistolary novels like Dickens' Pickwick Papers, except they had to wait whole months and even years to find out how those rambling plots resolved, whereas I had the Freya case closed in three smoking weeks of blissful surrender to my constantly pinging inbox.
The pace of life and letters sure has changed in the last 170-odd years.
Indeed, Dickens was one of the inspirations behind The Daughters of Freya - an "e-pistolary novel" co-written by Michael Betcherman, a Toronto filmmaker, and the Los Angeles-based journalist David Diamond. "It has that same built-in element of suspense," Betcherman explained to me by phone this week from Toronto, "but with a modern twist. It unfolds in e-mail messages that are sent out randomly through the day for three weeks, giving readers a very personal, real-time experience."
The story begins when Toronto journalist Samantha Dempsey receives a desperate e-mail from a friend in California whose daughter has joined a sex cult that is ostensibly dedicated to world peace through love but is in fact employing the unwitting (okay, witless) young women as bait in a corporate prostitution ring.
Betcherman and Diamond, both in their fifties, have created the classic midlife protagonist in Sam: uneasily married to a businessman who travels too much, with a troubled son and a demanding mom and a career in decline and friends who make her wonder why she needs enemies. Burdened with this excess baggage she stumbles into the scoop of her life, cc'ing us every step of the way.
Adding to the intrigue is the mixed baggage that goes with Internet use, where you never really know who's at the other end of an e-mail - where deception is rife, privacy is toast, and everyone gets Googled. It's a clever conceit as much as a novel, obliging the reader to follow the trail of clues by pulling e-threads together, including attached photos of suspects (the authors pose as two of the sex-cult johns) and online newspaper links documenting Sam's journalistic slouthing.
Betcherman and Diamond, old college buddies who've stayed in touch via e-mail, came up with the story idea a few years ago, but imagined it published in a conventional book. The aha! moment came on a cycling trip in the Okanagan last year when Betcherman was describing the project to his biking buddy, Vancouver doctor Jake Onrot. If the story is told through e-mail, remarked Onrot, why not publish it the same way?
It had never been done before, and made waves when they launched it in October at Toronto's Bouchercon 2004, the world's largest mystery conference. Press reviews have been glowing, as are the results of the reader survey that is e-mailed three weeks and exactly 100 messages after you've signed up for Chapter One. (The whole novel costs $10 at www.emailmystery.com, but you can sample the first three emails for free.)
So far about 1,000 people have bought it, says Betcherman, who is hopeful that word will travel fast on the info-highway. As it tends to do. In fact, many readers have jumped the gun and e-mailed the authors before getting to the survey, asking for more and faster installments. Of course the answer was no. The suspense relies on cliff-hanging episodes at the end of each day, forcing readers to wait for the next day's messages. And besides, the fictional story takes three full weeks to unfold, and this is supposed to be a real-time novel (unlike the warp-speed version of real time found on TV shows like 24).
Not that Freya is the most gripping mystery I've read. In fact, what gripped me had more to do with the medium than the messages. There's an eavesdropping quality to the narrative, kind of like hacking into your co-workers' inbox, which of course you would never do - even if it was loaded with juicy sex scandals, cult worship, filthy corporate lucre and bloody murder, and all you had to do to get the goods was click to open, and no one would know you were indulging your dirty little habit because from all appearances you're just slogging away at your computer, as usual, earning an honest day's wage. Would you?
Face time at the office has never been so much fun. Which is why this new form of e-novel has a much better chance at capturing the mass market than the first generation of Internet books. Stephen King, for example, generated a lot more buzz than readers. Most of us evidently prefer to take our fiction lying down than sitting in front of a computer.
Conventional fiction, that is. As Betcherman notes, "I wouldn't want to sit and read a chapter of a book on my computer, but I do read e-mail, I do read newspapers," he told me. "Up to now, Internet fiction has basically asked the reader to open an e-mail and read a chapter. We ask them to open an e-mail and read an e-mail."
The nice thing about Freya is most posts take less than a minute to read. Things happen rat-a-tat, and then it's over. Which was all too fast, according to some readers. The authors received a number of e-mails from early readers complaining that they hadn't had a chance to say a proper goodbye to their characters before it was over.
Fortunately, the other nice thing about Freya is it's digital - hence interactive. The authors took the early criticism to heart and rewrote the ending a month after publication. Readers seem happier now, says Betcherman. Conventional publishers: read and weep.
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