a coincidence of the less interesting kind or just a reflection of fashion: just after my little blurb on found photographs last summer, I picked up an entertainment reading pocketbook with a nice cover, which turned out to be a fantasy novel written based on such found photography. Hell, the guy made an effort to stick to a rather harrypotterish young-adult-prose suspense story, but in a slightly different setting this would have been a perfectly surrealist game. The novels (there is an original and a sequel) are not bad at all. No, I have never believed it would be worth the effort to pick up a novel by that Rowling, but young-adult-fantasy is not hopeless as a framework for atmosphere, nice invented mythology, and exploratory-worthy twists, as clearly shown by Ursula K LeGuin and Philip Pullman earlier. And these novels of "Miss Peregrine and her peculiar children" now (by Ransom Riggs) are clearly worth the effort too, for those who do read novels and don't mind a bit of silliness and conventionality, a tolerance which is necessary prerequisite to read novels regularly anyway...
1 comment:
Apparently, writing fiction in connection with uncanny found photographs are now officially a trend, since publishers launch rather artificial followers. One example is the trivial teenage supernatural mystery novels of Madeleine Roux where allegedly found images play an important role, but they are carefully photoshopped by an advertising agency, and the publisher seems not to realise that in that case they are actually not found images…
Post a Comment