The latest book from James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton will keep readers busy deciphering the codes within, writes Stuart Danker
ENDGAME: The Calling is the latest novel by authors James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. The duo have numerous bestselling titles between them, namely A Million Little Pieces and I Am Number Four (Frey), and the Full Fathom Five series (Johnson-Shelton).
I recently had the opportunity to interview Frey in conjunction with the launch of his book. “Yeah, there are writers who tend to procrastinate. I do it sometimes. But to get going again, I just keep reminding myself that writing is also a job, and I have to work like everyone else,” he tells me.
He works on the premise that a few pages a day is all he needs to be happy with, and it is a pretty effective method, seeing as how he’s just put another book on the shelves.
For someone whose works have been adapted to visual media, Frey confides that he doesn’t always write with the intention of having his books translated for the silver screen. “The book is always the most important thing. I’ll never know if something will get made, so you have to assume the book will live only as a book.”
Endgame: The Calling takes readers on a journey through myriad cultures and places. Suffice to say, it would have entailed a huge amount of research to get things right. Frey credits the web as his source of research, saying that writing this book would not have been possible without the use of the Internet. As someone who combines more modern forms of media and marketing with traditional print, Frey definitely knows how to utilise the Internet to its maximum potential.
He shares: “We have a global puzzle and treasure hunt, multiple social media channels for characters, YouTube videos, the Alternate Reality Game, and the mobile game. Neither would the research for this book really have been possible without online resources. Being able to see the streets of Xi’an, China, for example, or satellite views of the Terracotta Army complex was essential. It’s a coincidence that we’re working with John Hanke at Google on the mobile game. John’s the guy who basically created Google Maps, but it’s a perfectly fitting coincidence.”
He adds: “Most of the cultural research was also done over the Internet. Aside from Wikipedia, there are countless sites on Stonehenge, the disks of Bayan-Kara-Ula, or Gobekli Tepe, among many other things that we touch on in our series. We also used publications such as National Geographic, which during the time we were writing The Calling, had articles both on Gobekli Tepe and on the Terracotta Army. But basically, the research process consisted of losing ourselves in lots of links. It was a lot of fun. There is some crazy stuff out there!”
Frey even gives a little hint about the characters in the book having Google Plus and Twitter feeds that have been active for a year. “When readers and fans start discovering them they’re going to find material where, maybe, they didn’t expect it. They will even be able to ‘interact’ with them. I think that all of these things will be used in the future of publishing not to replace books, but to enhance them.”
Frey has put a lot of work into the book, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t set aside some leisure time to read. When probed about his favourite books to bring on his travels, he confides: “Thrillers and commercial fiction are my ‘poisons’ of choice!”
REVIEW
Endgame: The Calling
Author: James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton
Pages: 477
Publisher: HarperCollins
In the age of shorter attention spans and less focused reading, it’s a wonder that James Frey is taking this complicated path with Endgame: The Calling. The book goes by the context of having a code in every page and every word within. Readers not only have a fun story to follow, but puzzles to solve as well.
Frey attributes his inspiration of writing this book to his childhood experience with the book Masquerade by Kit Williams. Frey mentions getting his ideas from what Williams did — which was hiding a golden rabbit in Britain for the person who solved the book puzzles to discover.
Of course, with the invention of the Internet, puzzles can become a whole lot simpler and people can work together to solve the puzzles within the book, but one would only need to read past the first chapter to realise that perhaps it’s not as easy an undertaking as it seems.
One big clue about the puzzles would be the way the prose is written. Every numeral detail is precise. For instance, when a character waits for time to pass, they don’t wait for “a few minutes”. No, they wait for 37 minutes and 23 seconds. Their heartbeats are constantly measured, even their ages are taken down to two decimal points. This could either be a good or a bad thing, depending on who’s reading it.
The journey itself is a quest-based story, following the lives of 12 children as they fight for the survival of their tribes. If it sounds familiar to you, it’s because the plot has been likened to The Hunger Games series. Rest assured, however, that this book bears no resemblance with the way it develops and the way it’s written.
While the book seems to cater to younger readers, there is a lot of exploration into the theme of death in this book. Many such deaths occur nonchalantly, especially when it concerns innocent bystanders. The number of casualties from this book is surprisingly high, almost rivalling the numbers in the Game of Thrones series, with much less drama associated to each.
We won’t know how the series will turn out, but we do know one thing . Prizes await those who play the game.By Stuart Danker