Serial Novels, Not to be Confused with Serial Killers

Which are entirely different.

Serial novels are a novel that has is published one page or one section a day or some time frame.  Its a very intriguing method to publish something and I hope it becomes a more used system.  The two books I’ve seen published this way are Machine Man and Dracula; I’ll explain them in more detail below.

Machine Man can best be summed up in the following excerpt, page 1 in fact.  It also holds the Frank award for most entertaining intro and the reason that I suffer through the page a day publishing schedule.

“One Tuesday afternoon my left leg was severed. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Well, it was. It was agonizing. There was a lot of screaming and flopping around and trying to tear my shirt into pieces to stem the bleeding. While I was busy with this, my co-workers stared through two-inch polycarbonate security glass and beat on the door. They couldn’t get in. It was sealed for their safety. I had to apply my own tourniquet and try not to pass out for eight minutes. While I lay there, waiting for the time-release, I could see the top of what used to be my leg poking out from between two thick slabs of steel, gently dripping blood to the floor. I felt sorry for it. My leg hadn’t asked for this. It had been a good leg. A faithful leg. And now look at it.

But in the weeks afterward, as I lay in my hospital bed, I came to see the bright side. I remembered that expression: A setback is just an opportunity in disguise. I decided that was true. Because while I was sad to lose my leg, now I could build a better one.”

The only thing I have to say is damn! Is that not the most awesome opening page you’ve ever read!

While Machine Man is a new novel for a new world, being fed a story a piece at a time leaving you wanting more, Dracula is a timeless classic being adapted to a new vehicle.

In case you’ve lived under a fucking rock your entire life, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, written by Bram Stoker (I couldn’t help myself) is the story of a man who has a personal encounter with Count Dracula himself. I’m sure I could have come up with another way to write that….but I’m not that creative so don’t judge me. It’s written in the format of a series of journal articles and letters written by several different narrators throughout the story. The first entry in the book is that of May 3, which just so happened to have been yesterday. I would have written about this then but I stumbled across it this morning in my perusal of my news feeds while I’m at work. The author of the blog is posting the book in realtime. Meaning that when things were written in the book, so they are posted online. Its only 2 postings into it so far and I’m already hooked, I’d suggest you all check it out. I’ll include links to both of these at the end of the posting, as well as rss feeds you can copy and paste into your newsreader.

Machine man you can find the site at http://maxbarry.com/machineman/

And the rss feed is http://www.maxbarry.com/machineman/feed.rss

For Dracula the site is http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/

And the rss feed for it is http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

So what are some books that you would like to see given out in serial format? I’d be partial to something like fight club or shogun, but they abandon the date format through most of the story so it wouldn’t work.