Level 26

A few days ago I finished reading Level 26 By Anthony E. Zucker with Dave Swierczynski. It's being billed as the world's first Digi-Novel. So what you do is, you sign up at this website, and at selected intervals in the novel you go to the website, enter a specific code and watch bits of footage that are related to the book (crime scenes, clips of the killer, things like that). At first the idea intrigued me. It's a novel about a serial killer who has hit an all new level of off the charts fucked-up-ed-ness (that's what Level 26 signifies...apparently before this guy, serial killer fucked-up-ed-ness was measured on a scale of 1-25...and they had to create an all new level to cover the scope of crazy that this guy was)...I wasn't expecting a work of literary genius or anything (obviously...the book was penned by the guy who created CSI), but it was something different (this whole Digi-Novel business), so I figured "what the hell, I'll give it a shot". Plus it was a loaner that I got from my brother in law, and he said it was fairly twisted, so I'd likely enjoy it.
I've gotta say, I'm not sold on this Digi-Novel crap...perhaps if it was executed better, then I would have a higher opinion of it, but if you've ever read my blog before, you know that I have a bit of a problem at times with books translating properly onto film, and in this case, the two were conceived (supposedly) at the same time, and carried to fruition with the sole intention of creating the "World's first Digi-Novel"...so why were there so many inconsistencies between what was written in the book and what was depicted in the film clips? Why were some of the characters so poorly cast for the roles they were playing? Either the author didn't realize that when you describe a character's skin as "milky" the connotation is 'pale' not 'smooth'...if he wanted a dairy reference for smooth, he should have used 'creamy', not 'milky' (and I don't think that this is me being entirely too picky...I've asked a bunch of people what they think of when they read 'milky skin', and I'm not alone in my interpretation...in fact, no one said smooth...pale was the consensus). Or, the folks casting the visual bits didn't bother to take their cues from the author. Either way, the girl who was cast as the 'milky' skinned character was clearly of mixed racial background...it just didn't make sense. Even some of the footage that was supposed to be taken by the serial killer from a video camera on a tripod was moving footage...from different camera angels. A little bit of continuity would have gone a long fucking way to make this "Digi-Novel" far more frightening, and have the end result be much more satisfying for the reader/viewer.
Don't get me wrong, the story was creepy, and I did sleep with my bedside light on one night in the middle of reading the book because I was altogether creeped out, but if they were trying to break new ground, and be the first to publish a multimedia novel, they should have made sure that they pulled it off without a hitch, which they didn't. It all seemed a little ill conceived and poorly executed. But that's just one girl's opinion.

PS- it was also kind of an annoying pain in the ass to try to log on to the website to watch the footage at the end of almost every chapter.