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 Entertainment | Books | May 2006 
"Lost" Book Clues In Fans
 Gina Serpe - Yahoo! News
| | Bad Twin has only been available for couple of days, but the book has already nabbed endorsements from two high-profile names: Sawyer and Hurley. |
Bad Twin has only been available for couple of days, but the book has already nabbed endorsements from two high-profile names: Sawyer and Hurley.
Hyperion Books released the mystery novel this week, marking one small step for Lost promotional tie-ins and one giant leap from fiction to reality.
The book, written by fictitious Oceanic Flight 815 passenger Gary Troup—for those without their decoder rings, his name is an anagram of "purgatory"—is being billed as the last manuscript from the author, who supposedly dropped the book off at his publisher just days before perishing on the made-for-TV flight.
ABC announced plans to market the character's book last November and have since managed to crowbar in several scenes which find castaways perusing the manuscript, which miraculously managed to survive the crash, the ocean, the fires and the routine pillages by the seemingly illiterate Others with all its pages in tact.
Just as miraculously, the completed book also managed to find its way to a Disney-owned publishing house.
"We got this manuscript from this guy and we couldn't reach him," Hyperion president Bob Miller told the Associated Press. "He apparently got on this plane in Australia and has been lost at sea."
The book's cover features a tantalizing selling point for would-be Troup fans, declaring the mystery "His Final Novel Before Disappearing on Oceanic Flight 815."
The plot, pieced together for fans who may actually read the book and not just scan lines for clues pertaining to the series, centers on the detective Paul Artisan who is hired to track down the "bad twin" Zander Widmore by his "good twin" Cliff. Along the way, Artisan enlists the help of a good buddy who just so happens to be well-versed in biblical parables and metaphors on the meaning of life.
As expected, Bad Twin is chalk full of cheeky references to the primetime juggernaut, including several mentions of the 17th century philosopher John Locke (that's the sound of legions of Lost fans perking up), a makeshift boat named "Escape Hatch," allusions to life being complicated and unable to be boiled down to something as simple as, say, "a string of numbers," and of course, most of the action takes place on a mysterious—and fictional—island.
"As with every island, there was something slippery and mysterious about Peconciquot," the book reads, per an excerpt from the Toronto Sun. "It was connected to the larger world, and then again it wasn't. It had a logic of its own, a highly local mythology that made perfect sense within its confines yet fitted uneasily with the mind-habits of the world beyond its boundaries."
That clears that up.
For those fans wishing to check out more of Troup's work, they may want to dig up his first novel, The Valenzetti Equation. That is, if it actually existed they might. The book is described as centering on a mathematical equation which predicts the apocalypse and while no more specifics have been released, it's likely Lost fans could hazard an accurate guess as to which numbers may be involved in the solution.
Still, should fans decide to crack open Bad Twin, they'd be in good, albeit fake, company.
On Lost's Feb. 8 episode, Hurley pulled the immaculately preserved manuscript from the plane's wreckage and just this week, unlikely bookworm Sawyer was happened upon extolling the literary merits of the whodunit.
Of course, thinly-veiled as the novel may be, one mystery still remains: Who actually wrote it. While Stephen King and Ridley Pearson, both self-confessed fans of the show, have drawn speculation as the author, harsh critics dismiss the theory, claiming the tome is too poorly written to come from the mystery masterminds. Most likely, the book was a committee effort.
But for those who just aren't into the whole reality thing, an interview with Troup has been made available on Amazon.com.
Lost's season finale airs May 24. |
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