The Los Angeles Times reports that:
This season, the TV drama “Lost” will make pop culture history when it becomes the first show ever to have a character write a book in the real world.
Which the publishers of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer — to say nothing of The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper, Hidden Passions: Secrets from the Diaries of Tabitha Lenox, or The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red — might take issue with, as all of these books were “written” by fictional characters from television programs. And books by fictional characters are hardly anything new.
Of course, what separates those earlier TV books from this one, as the Times does point out, is that it “neither explains nor expands upon the show but seeks to be an authentic artifact.” You could, therefore, conceivably read the novel without any prior (or subsequent) knowledge of Lost as a television series. (This is different, then, even from the number of fake websites that have sprung up in connection with the show.)
It’s a little unclear, then, what exactly the point of the whole endeavor is — unless it’s just to see how far fans’ obsession with the show actually will go, and just how much they’re actually willing to buy. It sounds a little like a marketing ploy.
I tend to stay away the websites above, or the many forums that obsess over details and screenshots and audio clips from the show. I avoid spoilers like the plague. I think the show is terrific, but my own obsession with it stretches only so far. I don’t forsee reading this upcoming novel myself, if only because I’ve already got so much else to read.