The Raw Shark Texts

"It’s definitely a popular book and seems inspired by House of Leaves . I don’t think it’s as sophisticated or as ambitious, but it is interesting and very fun – so that people who like House of Leaves will also like The Raw Shark Texts . You know, yesterday I actually received an e-mail from Steven Hall, the author. He’d seen something on the net about a talk I’d given on The Raw Shark Texts at an academic conference, and he was interested to hear what I had to say about his novel, to read my talk! And you know, that would only happen in the digital age. I mean, it’s not as though an academic conference would usually catch the eye of an emergent, popular writer, particularly, and this is really ironic, a conference titled ‘Bookishness in the Digital Age’! The novel is supposedly going to be turned into a movie, so it obviously struck a popular chord. Unlike House of Leaves , which went viral (and whose author refused movie deals for the book), The Raw Shark Texts seems to have had a sophisticated multimedia marketing campaign framing it from the beginning. For example, one of the teasers on YouTube is a short but very polished clip of Tilda Swinton reading an excerpt from the novel in her incredibly calm and terrifying voice. So the novel was released already envisaging itself as a mass market, multimedia phenomenon. I would say the latter. I would say that both books rely on readers’ multimedia literacy as a means of producing their own literariness. And this takes us back to our initial discussion of literacy versus the literary in the digital realm. When House of Leaves came out, the idea that it could be connected to the net, that you could discuss it on line, that people were beginning to research on Wikipedia what was and wasn’t true in this book, was pretty new and exciting, and that was part of the adventure of reading the 700-page novel. But The Raw Shark Texts seems to be addressing a different kind of readership, one that has evolved since House of Leaves ’s publication in 2000. I think there’s been a change in the way that people read and a change in what they expect to read even just over the last decade. A radically new form of literacy? Absolutely. I think that people are reading in different ways. And I think the place to look to see these changes is the location where conventional print literature and digital literature meet. That’s where these works live – House of Leaves , The Raw Shark Texts , and digital literature too – at the interstices."