A View From Corona #9
Jeremy Lassen | July 28th 2002 at 11:48 am
“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”
- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness
Working in a genre specialty bookstore in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district gives me a very unique perspective. The store gets a lot of foot traffic. A lot of “straight” people who don’t read the genre, and/or don’t read fiction in general sometimes mistakenly stumble through the doors. When they do, I try to be as accommodating as possible, and more often than not, I can get them to leave with a book that is just right for them. My favorite example of this is when a gentleman came in looking for travel books, specifically books about Bed & Breakfasts, because he needed a gift for a friend who was opening a B&B in Memphis, TN. He ended up leaving with “the perfect gift”, a contemporary horror anthology, More Monsters From Memphis. A similar, but rather depressing thing happened this weekend. A gentleman came in and asked for automobile books. I apologized, and told him what the store specialized in, and he pondered that… “Horror… I like Horror. I love Tales from the Crypt”. I told him we had some graphic novels, but didn’t really have any movie or media tie in stuff. Instead, we mainly had novels and short stories. “Books without pictures?” he asked. Yeah. Books without pictures.
He pondered this, and then said “Do you have The Mockingbird Murder Mystery? I shook my head and said the store mainly carried horror, and not mystery. He nodded and asked “But could you get it for me. My grandma told me that that was one of the scariest, most bone chilling books she ever read”. I told him we might be able to, and began searching on-line. Nothing in print with that title. I searched on a used book database… nothing with that title. I told him it didn’t look like we could get a copy. I figured he probably had the title wrong, though I kind of suspected his grandmother wasn’t referring to To Kill a Mockingbird…
Normally, this would have been the end of it, but this gentleman was incredulous that it wasn’t available, and insisted that it was a very popular book. I shrugged and told him I would do a more general search — I searched Google. And this is what I found.
Episode: #1 - “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her”
Summary: Lucy has been reading a novel, The Mockingbird Murder Mystery, which has placed her completely on edge….
One of two things has happened here. Either this gentleman’s grandmother (who probably wasn’t an avid reader) had incorporated this TV episode into her own life story and, assuming that be book was real, used it as an example of a scary book she herself had read. The other scenario is that this young man’s childhood memories of watching Lucy re-runs have merged with memories of his grandmother. I’m not sure which explanation is sadder.
But it does demonstrate the point that, to the non-reading public, books only exist as they exist in relationship to Television and the Movies. So much so that satirical title of a fictional book, in a long running TV sitcom is more real in the mind of this person than any of the hundreds of thousands of “real” books that have been published during his lifetime.
After telling this gentleman that I couldn’t find any copies of the book (I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth), he then asked about The Amityville Horror. Sigh. This guy was a walking object lesson. His only connection with written fiction is what he has been exposed to on television.
I told him that yes, we probably had or could get a copy of that novel. He started talking about how movie scared him as a child, and how it was based on a real incident. I half-heartily told him that the Amityville incident had been debunked… that it had been a scam by some homeowners who couldn’t afford their mortgage payment. I could tell by his reaction that I had really shattered one of the cherished childhood memories.
If I wanted to get really existential I would refer to the scene in Shadow of a Vampire, where John Malkovich, in a stunning climax, tells the vampire that “If you’re not in the frame, you don’t exist!” (But I promised not to talk about movies so I won’t). If I wanted to be a pretentious grad student, I might start talking about Aristotle’s “shadows on the cave wall,” and how only visual narratives (TV and Film) seem to cast shadows in today’s society, and that written narratives (Books) don’t seem to cast any. But I eschewed grad-school for the glorious life of independent publisher, so I won’t go that route either…
Ever since the invention of broadcast media, the written narrative has been on the decline. How many readers did Dickens have when he was writing? How many weekly and monthly fiction magazines existed in the 19th century? Even the early 20th century supported a broad range of fiction markets (because it was the cheap and universal form of entertainment). At the beginning of the century, a writer would make most of his or her money from the serial, or magazine publication of his or her work.
William Hope Hodgson is a great example of this. Records indicate that he made almost no money from the hardcover publication of his books. Rather, the books played the important role of brining his work to the attention of the magazine editors of the time who, (due to their [compared to today] staggering circulation rates) could afford to pay top dollar. Fiction magazines were the mass market, mass media entertainment of the day. They were the cable television, and the multiplexes of the day. There were riots at the docks when the new installments of popular Charles Dickens serials finally arrived in America.
Oh, how times have changed. I’ve touched briefly on the economics of publishing in previous columns. Consider… magazine markets pay virtually nothing, and exist primarily for writers to get noticed by the editors at book publishing houses. This change reflects the changing demographic of people who see written fiction as their primary form of entertainment. When lots of people read, pulp magazines were the most cost effective method of getting the fiction to the public. When fewer people read, paperback books became the most cost effective method of getting fiction to the public. When even FEWER people read, hardcovers (and trade paperbacks) became the most cost effective way to get deliver fiction to the market. And following this reflection of the economies of scale, when a very very small number of people read and want to buy (say, classic ghost fiction), then limited edition hardcovers with $40-$60 cover prices become the most cost effective way to deliver the material.
Notice, that as the market declines, the price goes up. This creates economic barriers to entry into the art form, making the form more and more elitist. As the audience for stage plays dwindled, prices went up, as did the annual income of said audiences. When Shakespeare was writing, stage plays were the mainstream mass media of the day. The combination of higher literacy rates and the industrial revolution made it more economical to deliver entertainment via written stories. Theatrical productions simply weren’t as economical, and they went into decline… now staged plays are upscale entertainments enjoyed semi-regularly by people who have substantial discretionary income.
Go to a contemporary playhouse, or an opera house. Look around at the ratio of older, affluent people, to younger, poorer people. Look at your own wallet after you buy a ticket. This is the future of the written story and of hardcover books. Soon the only reason people will write fiction is because it will give them a chance to be noticed by the gatekeepers of mass media and mass entertainment… not pulp magazine editors, but film and television producers.
But wait. The future is already here. One of the most common complaints (usually by elitist critics) about popular fiction - both mainstream and genre - is that the books are “written like a screen play”. Of course they are written like a screenplays. The only reason books are written and published is to get a shot at the proverbial Fat Movie Check. This is why books like The Horse Whisperer, and The Relic were written (by unsuccessful screen writers) and published (by media conglomerates who get most of their income from their television and movie divisions). It’s called Synergy. Its why the majority of “fiction” published by the 5 remaining “New York” media conglomerates are either books that hope to be made into movies, or books that are based on the fictional worlds of a television or movie series, such as Star Wars, or Buffy, or Star Trek, or Farscape, or StarGate, or Charmed, or whatever.
This is my present/future dystopia. This is where the trends are leading. I hope I am wrong. But I Love Lucy, and A Mocking Bird Murder Mystery have sent me into a black spiraling dystopic depression. Are we the consumers of written fiction… are we simply feeding on the corpse of a dying art form? Time will tell…
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