During my one of my final classes in my MLIS program, I was introduced to a different medium of story telling. I'm familiar with different formats of materials, such books, audiobook, graphic novels, and so forth. But for the most part, they all generally tend to keep their stories contained within the chosen format.
However, in recent months I have been introduced to something called "TransMedia" stories. Much like you would expect from the term itself, this is a brand of book that integrates various forms of media within the tale for you to get a deeper and different perspective to the story. It was a very cool and interesting sub-genre and I'd like to share a pair of examples with you: one for the younger crowd and one of the adults.
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I was first introduced into the genre by a young adult story (shocker) by Patrick Carmen called Skeleton Creek. It's premise comes from the perspective of a young man named Ryan McCray in a one horse town with a bit of interestingly spooky legend behind it. It's told from the perspective of him writing in a journal. So he's always either referring to events before or after they happen. He's currently being forbidden from seeing his best friend Sarah Fincher because their last little outing resulted him getting his leg broken.
But throughout the book, he references her website and video blog. Sarah represents the outgoing and adventurous half of their duo. She thinks the story behind the abandoned gold Dredge outside of town has more than it seems behind it. So despite the two being separated and constantly pushed to stay out of "The Dredge", She continues to explore it and reports her findings to Ryan via her website www.sarahfincher.com with the help of passwords she leaves him.
The reader, should they explore, will find that this is a legitimate website and that the passwords do in fact work. And if you enter the passwords as you find them, you are treated to what I refer to as perspective chapters where Sarah brings you the other half of the story. They are very well done and they bring in dynamic that makes the story that much more creepy than if you had just read the book alone. I have provided an example below of one of the first few vlogs you get in the story. I found myself getting easily engrossed in this one and ended up flying through it in a few hours.
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The other story is one that I really enjoyed was murder mystery by J.C. Hutchins called Personal Effects: Dark Art. It tells the story of a young hotshot therapist who has been tasked in investigating and rehabilitating a serial murder suspect called Martin Grace. Grace is suffering from a rare form of psychosomatic blindness because he is able to foresee how each of the murder victims would perish and inform them of such prior to it happening. He also bears a warning of a mysterious figure known only as the "Dark Man" who in some way seems to be tied to these murders and is an entity that Grace intensely fears.
Zach is an art therapist, and through various interview and unconventional art sessions he intends to root through the buried past of Grace to find the cause of his blindness and hopefully cure it to make him well enough to stand trial. But Grace is a very cerebral opponent and has no intention of making things easy, which sends Zack to look through Grace's personal effects to try to unlock the mystery behind him. Be warned though, this is a pretty gruesome journey, and it's definitely not for everybody.
As the title leads on, this book comes with a series of various personal effects (bottom of link for examples) tucked neatly away in the cover of the book such as collection of papers, cards, forms, and pictures "recovered" from Martin Graces things. If you pay close enough attention to the items, you will find clues within them that give the reader a step ahead of Zach in the story. All of the phone numbers reach actual voice mails, where if you can discovers the codes you can listen to the messages left to them. The businesses have websites to give you better context about the locations, and so on.
The problem with this form of book however, is that sometimes the interactive elements are forgotten or not kept up with. There is an interesting side story with this book where one of the side characters somewhat took a life of its own to promote the book, and it ended up becoming more a real entity than the book itself. Unfortunately it caused a bit of a schism, and many of the associated websites were shut down. It's a shame, and forced me to use the Internet wayback machine to see the sites, but it was a fascinating story nonetheless.
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While not exactly a new or emerging genre of fiction, it is still relatively uncommon style in the mass market. But there are a various number of examples scattered throughout the CLEVNET catalog for both teens and adults. It is a very interesting concept and gives a new spin on reading and definitely worth looking into at least once. Here's hoping more authors explore this means of storytelling.
