Category: Recommendations

People are always looking for stories to sweep them away, to help them escape. There’s not inherently anything wrong with that, though sometimes I worry about taking that impulse to an extreme. When does immersion in a story start being harmful, both to the creators but also to the readers, viewers, and fans as well?

My new novel, The Franchise, imagines a fantasy film series that has taken the escapism mantra seriously. Unfortunately, since it’s owned by a growth-obsessed corporation, that means expanding the series beyond the bounds of mere films and into something like The Truman Show: a living set of the films’ world populated with characters acting out stories and scenarios in the world of the franchise (and being filmed). Fans can pay to have their memories altered and then live in this world – truly escape into it. Of course, there’s a cost to that.

I think the impulse to create stories that envelop us entirely is worth a little push back, which is why I always appreciate books that bounce up against the limits of their fictional constructs. These are books that are aware that the story, and the text itself, is not real, but that doesn’t mean that they think the story or the words don’t matter. Indeed, it’s often the case that the more metafictional a book is, the more urgent and serious it takes its mission to tell its story.

Here are some novels that engage with this metafictional impulse in various and often surprising ways.