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This Book Is Only Half the Story
By Mike Musgrove | Washington Post | Sunday, May 31, 2009
A video game blogger named Rachael Webster created a minor stir in the blogosphere last year, when it turned out that she didn’t exactly exist.
Sure, Webster has been cranking out interesting enough commentary at a site bearing her supposed nom de blog, PixelVixen707. She even got herself quoted in an article or two at other gaming news sites along the way. But you probably won’t bump into her at, say, the video game industry’s big trade show in Los Angeles this week. After all, she’s a character in a book.
“Personal Effects: Dark Art,” published next month by St. Martin’s Press, is a creepy page-turner about an art therapist in a mental institution trying to figure out whether one of his patients, a former CIA spook, committed a series of brutal murders. “Rachael Webster,” as it turns out, is the protagonist’s punk-rock girlfriend.
Get to the last page of “Personal Effects” and you’ll have many answers, but to fully enjoy this book, you’ll need a Web connection and an interest in puzzles.
“Personal Effects,” a collaboration between thriller writer J.C. Hutchins and game designer Jordan Weisman, is part book and partly the latest entry in the hybrid entertainment form known as “alternate reality games.” Play the game correctly and you might be able to pick up on details that the protagonists missed — and, perhaps, end up with a different perspective of the book’s events.
Read the full article here: The Washington Post: This Book Is Only Half the Story
