Vous le verrez bientôt (je l'ai déjà vu en VO ^^), l'un des passagers du vol Oceanic 815 a écrit un roman intitulé "Bad Twin" (Jumeau maléfique). Ce roman, dont le script apparait à l'écran, est sorti dans notre réalité et fait partie des bestsellers du New York Times.
Voici un article de ce journal:
Novels by unidentified authors have made the best-seller lists, as has at least one said to have been written by a soap opera character. But this may be the first time that a book by a nonexistent writer who is thought to have died in a plane crash has cracked the charts.
The book is "Bad Twin," by Gary Troup, a character from ABC's hit drama series "Lost." Troup was on Oceanic Flight 815, the plane that crashed in the show's first episode.
After making the Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com best-seller lists, the book, published by Hyperion this month, will appear for the first time on the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday, at No. 14. Hyperion said more than 300,000 copies had been printed.
The porous relationship between fact and fiction has fans buzzing in cyberspace about Troup's real identity (Stephen King comes up often) and how clues in the novel correlate with the show's plot. "Lost" features roughly four dozen survivors of a flight from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles that crashed on a mysterious Pacific island where bad things keep happening. (Gary Troup is an anagram for "purgatory," a theory already dismissed by the show's creators.) The series, with an average of 15.3 million viewers a week, had its season finale on Wednesday.
"Whenever people can be creative in a way that gets people reading books, I'm happy," Robert S. Miller, the president of Hyperion, said of the mystery within a mystery.
Both Hyperion and ABC are divisions of the Walt Disney Company. Whether "Bad Twin" is good fiction, good marketing for "Lost" or both is a judgment call.
The novel follows the private detective Paul Artisan, who is helping the scion of a wealthy family find his twin brother. Entertainment Weekly called the book "a chewy snack for Lost-philes, though its mythological value is T.B.D."
Margaret Maupin, a buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, said "Bad Twin" sold out quickly there. "I'm not sure that the people who are buying this are your general book buyers, but they love the TV show," she said.
Ms. Maupin said she was unconcerned that a book by a fictional author, connected to a television show, crossed a line. "There have been so many scandals in the last year in the book business," she said. "Nothing shocks me and nothing offends me anymore."
"Bad Twin" represents a hybrid between content and marketing, said Michael Benson, the senior vice president of marketing at ABC.
"We wanted the audience to believe this was real," he said of "Lost," adding that Troup can be seen being sucked into an airplane engine in the first episode. In an episode broadcast on Feb. 8, one of the show's characters was seen reading a manuscript of the book with the title, author and publisher clearly visible. In another episode shown this month, another character was seen reading the same manuscript, only to have it thrown into a fire by Jack, one of the castaways.
On Web sites devoted to "Lost," fans have been debating the meaning of the book and how it figures in the Chinese-box puzzle that is the "Lost" plot. On ABC's site devoted to the show, one post declared that the book was an "alternate reality" experience relayed to Troup. ("That's the only thing that makes sense.") Meanwhile, on the site The Lost Experience are lists of possible clues: the names of the characters, various literary references (including "The Great Gatsby," "Beowulf" and "King Lear") and even references to the color green.
To add to the layers of marketing and mystery, the book has been denounced by the Hanso Foundation of Copenhagen, which is also part of the "Lost" puzzle. The island where the "Lost" characters are stranded has bomb-shelter-type hatches, where they find videotapes made by Hanso that suggest the island was used for experiments or for scientific research. On its Web site, the fictional Hanso tells visitors not to read Troup's book. Hyperion, in return, has taken out real advertisements in real newspapers defending the book.
"It's about perpetuating the mystery and what's going on," Mr. Benson said. "Everyone knows Harry Potter doesn't exist, but it sure makes it more fun to believe that Harry Potter is somewhere out there, in a magical place."
Robert Thompson, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said there was a history of television shows' expanding their cultural equity into books. In 1990, he said, the book "The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer" was published to capitalize on the layered, mysterious show "Twin Peaks."
"What the entertainment industry has figured out is that 'Lost' is not just a television show; it's a lifestyle," Mr. Thompson said. "There's no limit. Not only are we going to see more books like 'Bad Twin' in the publishing business, but more shows like 'Lost,' in which you create this universe that people want to inhabit. You can make it real and put a price tag on it."
The jacket states that "Bad Twin" is Troup's "final novel before disappearing on Oceanic Flight 815," which went down in September 2004. The copyright page, though, mentions that the author is a fictional character.
Mr. Miller of Hyperion said the manuscript was given to him by two executive producers of "Lost," Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. He even expressed concern, in that clever "Lost" way, that the Hanso Foundation would ask for a recall of "Bad Twin."
As to whether the real author of "Bad Twin" will ever come forward, Mr. Miller was noncommittal. "What do you tell your children when they ask if there is a Santa Claus?" he asked.
Source :
LostMedia
Accueil 
