This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
James Frey's ambition is matched only by his talent for causing a stir: the author earned notoriety when his bestselling 2003 "memoir" A Million Little Pieces was revealed as partially fabricated. When not creating controversy with his books, he's doing it through Full Fathom Five, his young adult (YA) publishing company that, since 2010, has produced the hit I Am Number Four as well as allegations of unfair contracts. In October, Frey will release Endgame: The Calling, the first of a new trilogy co-written with Nils Johnson-Shelton about a global scavenger hunt. The kicker: its pages contain a real-world puzzle whose solver will win $500,000 (£295,000). Frey spoke to WIRED about his critics, the future of fiction and creating the challenge.
WIRED: How did the idea for Endgame come about?
James Frey: When I was ten my mum gave me a book called Masquerade by Kit Williams. It had this puzzle written into the text, and if you could solve the puzzle there was a solid-gold, jewel-encrusted hare buried somewhere. I became obsessed with it, and I was thinking how could I bring that same sense of excitement and wonder to a book.
You've created a huge Endgame universe -- novellas, a game, the film -- all before the novel is even out. How does that work? Whenever I am doing a novel now I think about how I can use the technology available to make it more than just a book.
I'm not that interested in doing just an old-fashioned book.
I look at social media, YouTube, the web and phoness as tools in my storytelling toolbox. So I had this idea to tell a story about a global scavenger hunt, and then build an actual global scavenger hunt using all the media we possibly could.
Full Fathom Five has previously released several experimental novels. My company was started to try to create the future of books. We were the first company to release a book with a synchronised soundtrack (The Power of Six), which we did with a company called BookTrack. We were the first to release a book with a video game (Jack Blaine's The Nightworld), where you had to read the book to play the game and vice versa. We were the first company to write the book and the script side-by-side, which we did with DreamWorks (I Am Number Four). In many ways, that was all prep to do Endgame.
At the centre of the book is the puzzle, and there are complex cryptographic clues embedded into the text. How much input did you have in designing it?
I have a friend who worked for Goldman Sachs who told me about this crazy charity scavenger hunt that the company does every year. I got in touch with Mat Laibowitz, who runs it. He's a PhD from MIT Media Lab, an unbelievably smart dude. He and his company, Futuruption, built the real puzzle.
**The book also has a built-in social-media element.
How will it work?** The 13 major characters in the books have had Twitter and Google+ feeds running for nine months, so when the book comes out they will have had social-media profiles for over a year. We have a YouTube channel that has about three and a half hours of content on it. We make them all here at our offices in Connecticut. Nobody knows they exist yet, but when the book comes out, people will discover them.
You've also collaborated with Google Niantic Labs to create an accompanying Endgame smartphones app. We wanted to build the puzzle in the book using Google search results and Maps co-ordinates. I was also fascinated because Niantic had just launched (augmented-reality title) Ingress. So I approached John Hanke, who runs Niantic, and he said, "We've been thinking about the same things." We're creating a separate fiction for the AR game, which springboards off six novellas Google are publishing called The Endgame Outsider.
Do you think YA novels are more commercially viable than those aimed at older audiences Part of the reason we wrote a YA book is because 60-year-olds are not going to get lit up on this the way a 16-year-old will. That's a very generational thing.
There has already been an online backlash due to assumed similarities with the plot of The Hunger Games.
If you read the book it's not like The Hunger Games, really. And you can trace heavy influence on The Hunger Games back to Japan. People are going to compare it to something -- and people like to take a shot at me, and that's fine.
Given your history with A Million Little Pieces, do you think that people are going to trust the puzzle is real? A Million Little Pieces came out 11 years ago. If people don't believe I'm going to give away the gold, they don't have to participate. I've got a lot of corporate partners -- Fox, HarperCollins, Google -- who are all in this together. If I say I am doing this and I don't do it, I can get sued into the ground.
Do you see projects such as this as the future of novels? For ten years people have been discussing what some call "transmedia" -- I don't really like that word -- or what the future of storytelling is. So yeah, I think the future is some version of this. My company is working on three or four more universes like [Endgame]. If this works the way we hope it does, a lot of people will follow.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
