Gentle Readers, there will be spoilers below. On the other hand, the publisher has already spoiled the spoiler. See, Breath, by Donna Jo Napoli, is a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but is also a sort of mystery. Ms. Napoli has, cleverly I think, replaced the suspense of the Pied Piper story with new suspense, adding a mysterious illness accompanied by hallucinations. The little lame boy (who Lives to Tell the Tale) does not get ill, and attempts to find out what is causing it. He doesn’t, quite, but there is enough in the story to let us figure out that the grain has a peculiar mold that is a hallucinogen and, if taken for long enough, poisonous. Ms. Napoli does a nice job of laying out how that works, from the rainy summer and the cows falling ill as they graze, to the pigs getting grain in the autumn, to the affluent townfolk who get the new bread first, to the farmers as they finish off the old grain and start with the new crop, and finally the beer festival (from which the Piper leads the children, who haven’t drunk the poisonous LSD-laced beer, and are therefore not doooooomed).
The problem is that the book jacket says “the townsfolk of Hameln are affected by a mold that grows on the hops—poisoning their mead and beer”. So does the publisher’s website. On the Amazon site, the School Library Journal also spoils it (although the Booklist review does not). If your library has Bibliomation, the Summary note is just right, but still, the publisher has ensured that most people who read this book will begin already knowing what causes the plague. And if that doesn’t ruin this book, it certainly makes it a lot less pleasurable a read.
Now, in this case it’s just the publisher’s imbecility at fault. But for a lot of books, and more movies, the smart way to market the book is to let the potential audience know that the book is about X, even if X is meant to be a surprise. The example that comes to my mind immediately is The Truman Show, where absolutely everybody that saw it knew before they went in that Truman had been in a television show all his life, all unbeknownst like, and so the whole first part of the movie, where that is revealed, is wasted and pointless. It requires not so much suspension of disbelief as suspension of knowledge.
I’m not talking about when the reviewer gives away the surprise ending, which happens a lot, too. No, I’m talking about when the publicity campaign gives away something, not usually the ending, but an aspect of the set-up that the movie or book itself waits to reveal for a significant length of time. Blindfold Game has been the St. Martin’s Press Read-it-First book this week; in Monday’s email they said “Edgar Award winner Dana Stabenow turns her excessive talent to an international thriller, in which a Coast Guard captain and a CIA analyst must prevent a terrorist attack coming at the US from the sea.” Well, and over the first 17 pages, we haven’t met the Coast Guard captain, and we’ve just met the CIA analyst at the beginning of chapter three. I wouldn’t know that the CIA analyst is going to be a main character, if it weren’t for the blurb. We also only sort-of know that the guys in chapters one and two are terrorists, and we know that they have arranged for something to be transported by boat. It’s all very mysterious. Unless you read the blurb.
Now, I don’t really blame St. Martin’s, because clearly they have to sell the book, and telling us what the book is about is part of that, and I don’t know how else they might have done it (unlike Breath, where you could just say ‘mysterious illness’ and be done). And, at the same time, I can’t blame Ms. Stabenow for building up a bit of mystery and suspense at the beginning; it’s a perfectly legitimate literary technique. But the result is that there are two wasted chapters at the start of the book.
Wait a minute—a better example. How are you going to sell The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe without telling people it’s (among other things) a talking-animal fantasy? And if the reader or moviegoer knows it’s a talking-animal fantasy, what do you do with the bit before it’s a talking-animal fantasy? What about Five Children and It? The recent film of that is nearly unwatchable anyway, but still, how do you regain the sense of surprise when you meet It, when you know that the movie is a fantasy from the box?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.