How to Push a Book Beyond its Limits
/Some people tend to think that books are a restrictive medium. That’s certainly fair, you can’t rely on flashy VFX or sweeping soundtracks in the literary industry, like how films and video games do it. However, this builds the misconception that books, and the stories they tell are all the same. That when you open a book, you’ll always be greeted by walls of black text on a white background, and it’ll all be presented in a mundane order. This could not be further from the case.
An example I’m preferential to is the VERMIS series by Plastiboo. The two books in the series take the appearance of old video game manuals, ones you’d buy back in the eighties or nineties. For some, these books are just that, interesting concept novels that put aesthetic over telling any coherent story. For those who read a bit deeper, though, there are instances where the book drops the distant speech mannerisms and talks to the reader with uncomfortable familiarity.
Within a scene in the middle of the book, where the protagonist takes a rest in an abandoned cabin, there’s a line that reads “While inspecting the fireplace you might notice a strong smell coming from the chimney. Avoid looking up.” This line, accompanied by a low quality, pixelated chimney with what looks to be a face at the top of it, does a really good job of instilling terror within the reader, something that might be difficult given the book’s strange and unorthodox format.
If you need more convincing (and don’t care much for spoilers), the book opens and closes in a very specific way. The first line we read is:
“A corpse kneels beside a well.
Mesmerized by the reflection of its living flesh, it wonders what could have been done and what could have been.
And for as long as the moon shines, the feeble illusion will prevail.”
Courtesy of Plastiboo, Hollow Press
On its own, this is already a fantastic opener, setting the tone for the rest of the book as this dreary, half-forgotten place between places. Then, these lines gain deeper importance at the end of the book:
“A feeble illusion shatters in silence.
The void swaddles you gently, welcoming you back;
a life has been lived and the Dream is no longer.
The old bones now slumber, waiting for the moon to shine once again.”
These seemingly throwaway lines about things that should be too cryptic to understand without an accompanying video game make themselves understood if you’re willing to hear the book out to the end.
Photo taken by Emman Montalvan, owned by Mark Z. DanielewskI
Another book that subverts modern literary conventions so hard its been deemed “unadaptable” is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. I have yet to read the book myself, but the previews and reviews online paint a vivid picture of this novel’s identity. It’s also been called one of the hardest books to read, using white space, or lack thereof at times to make the reader feel claustrophobic or distant.
This is something that people don’t consider with books. A movie can instill feelings by using sound effects to increase tension or keeping a camera close to an actor’s face to make the viewer feel claustrophobic. Conversely, books like House of Leaves show that this can be achieved with just words on paper.
So, why isn’t this approach used more often? Well, the two examples I gave before are obscure, with House Of Leaves getting a cult following before it was officially published. VERMIS as well only has periodic releases on a niche indie site called Hollow Press, with no print runs slated for any big-name publisher. It’s clear that experimenting with the medium in such a big way is still a new frontier, one that most publishers aren’t willing to take risks on.
In the future, maybe this won’t be the case. Maybe, books that dare to try something new won’t just have to skirt on the fringes of popularity, but have their own place within the industry. Everything that hasn’t been written still remains to be seen.
