But there are more artistic ways that books have begun to use transmedia to their advantage. Some authors have begun to play with the multimedia aspects of today's society within the pages of their books, to different ends.
For example, we have Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman's Cathy's Book and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, both of which use multimedia and transmedia within their narratives to very different results.
Cathy's Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233
Cathy's Book is a wonderful Young Adult series of novels, including the first, Cathy's Book, and its two sequels, Cathy's Key, and Cathy's Ring. These novels center on Cathy, a young woman who likes to draw (especially to draw young people as older), and falls in love with a mysterious young man. The plot is the typical Young Adult fantasy yarn, but what makes this series stand out is all the added things within the novel's pages.
Cathy's Book is not just Cathy's story, but her sketchbook. Pages are littered with sketches and comics drawn by Cathy the character, and illustrated in real life by Cathy Briggs. Accompanying the sketches are notes to herself about what happens in the text about the text, phone numbers to call and check the voicemail of, and urls to important websites that Cathy too is looking at. All these added illustration, phone numbers, and urls serve to move the plot forward. One can read the story straight through without these bonuses, but when a reader calls a number, they can hear a character's voice, and experience a separate point of view from Cathy's, just for a moment.
This book is special to me in that it started my journey with transmedia. It made me curious about all the different ways you could tell stories, and what all those different methods did to a story. What was the effect of hearing the characters' voices in voicemails left in the margins of the text? What did seeing her sketches and notes do to my understanding of Cathy? For me, it created a very intimate, exciting, and personal journey that the plot itself would not have given me. I got to know Cathy through the messages she left the readers and the messages her friends and lovers and enemies left her. While her story was like many other Young Adult novels, the things within it were brand new and endeared her to me instantly. My curiosity was peaked, and I suspect, the same happened for many readers.
Cathy's Book also has a promotional website, found here, that serves a very similar purpose to the transmedia marketing we saw with "Game of Thrones" and A Song of Ice and Fire. On the website you can age yourself up using an app that takes a photograph of you and simulates age, like Cathy's drawings. You can find other fans in the forums, look at clues, and discover the story together. It takes you to the series' facebook, youtube, and flickr pages all from there. Cathy's Book's promotional team nailed it with the website, but what really engages readers and makes them excited to participate in the book is the transmedia storytelling within it. That's what sells, and that is the primary focus of its promotional site as well, as it details precisely what is in store for readers when they pick up this book.
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, on the other hand, is a whole different ball game. So different, in fact, that I'm certain there is nothing quite like it.
House of Leaves is a horror novel structured in such a way that it is several novels within one. The multimedia and transmedia aspects of the story are arguably within the text itself, as the text is built of winding roads of footnotes, important additional materials of drawings, charts, poetry, all contained within the back, and a soundtrack made by the author's sister's band, Poe. It is perhaps harder to argue that it is transmedia, as we tend to think of transmedia as two separate mediums or more expanding a storyline (typically with ties to the internet as well). It certainly contains multiple mediums, mostly print, and multiple story lines that all build off of one another. Each storyline, however, is important to the narrative, rather than simply expanding upon it. The companion novel, The Whalestoe Letters, expands what is already within the novels in the appendices. A little spoiler here, so read with caution, but the band that wrote the soundtrack for the novel, Poe, appears at the end of the novel, a fact that doesn't seem that revelatory until one knows about Poe and that the soundtrack even exists.
It's tricky little details like that that truly makes House of Leaves a transmedia story, in my mind. So much of the story is hidden in the details, and one learns through multiple readings more and more of these details. The author has on his website, a forum specifically for discussing the novel, and helping others find these tricks and features that make the experience of reading House of Leaves come alive. Fans help one another, making it a community experience as well, as all over the world people discuss new theories and explanations.
The experience of reading the novel itself is fairly interactive. Similarly to Cathy's Book, House of Leaves pulls you into the narrative, directly speaking to the readers at times, utilizing the free-flowing and strange structure of pages to create the delusional and horrific feeling that the characters within the narrative are experiencing. The novel creates a physical space around itself that the reader is a part of by forcing the reader to turn pages, search through appendices, research to understand references, and take special note of language, words, and all their double meanings. For instance, leaves can also be leaves of paper, and what is a book but a house of leaves? (See what I, well Mark Z. Danielewski, did there?) If anything, transmedia is experimenting with multimedia and how different mediums affect how we engage with stories. House of Leaves, to its very core, does just that.
It can be argued that this is simply a very experimental narrative, but still traditionally a narrative. But I feel that in its experimentation that House of Leaves subtlely utilizes modern sensibilities and frames of mind that come with the Internet and transmedia storytelling. In that way, it truly grasps hold of its readers, and makes them even more frightened of the monster that is inside (or simply is) the book.
Both novels explore different ways, influenced by the web, on how to tell stories, utilizing different mediums to pull readers into the world of their narrative and believe that world. That is the goal of transmedia storytelling for many writers out there: to make the worlds of their narratives more believable. With A Song of Ice and Fire and "Game of Thrones" we saw how transmedia can help market traditional mediums, but here with Cathy's Book and House of Leaves we see how transmedia is slowly and steadily seeping its way into traditional media. Through these books we can see the artistic purposes that transmedia can serve-- it creates a fuller, more real world that can enrapture audiences. What's even more wonderful is that this is simply the start. There are many more ways to experiment with traditional media and transmedia narratives. There is no real gap between the two as very naturally they will come together. It is simply in our nature as storytellers to use the best tools at our disposal for our stories.
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