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One City, One Book turns to the dead
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Colma, our neighbor to the South is unique as the only incorporated city in America where the dead outnumber the living, an oddity that the new novel Alive in Necropolis stretches to both eerie and comical conclusions.
As popular culture's interest in zombies increases but interest in reading continues to decline, the annual One City, One Book program hitched up its bandwagon and invited all San Francisco residents to read about the restless dead as one. A series of events related to the book have been scheduled all month long.
On Wednesday, author Doug Dorst appeared at the main library as part of the Litquake festival, where it was announced that over 560 copies of the book have been checked out from local libraries in the past month.
foolsFURY gave life to the undead story
Theater group foolsFURY gave the event a unique flair with a well-acted staged reading, and luckily no severed limbs went flying into the crowd like the "readings" of Brain Dead Alive up the hill in Chinatown.
Doug took the stage with Adam Johnson, discussing his inspirations and his research methods, including his ride-along with Colma city police, and they discussed how much of the book is based on reality.
It turns out, the event dramatized just minutes earlier on the stage, the incident of the "exploding" pants, had happened to someone else on their ride-along while working security at Setan Medical Center in Daly City, mirroring the life of the book's protagonist.
Dorst, on the left, talks to Adam Johnson
The main character, Mike Mercer, patrols the ghost town and is forced to contend with its residents, living and dead. In early drafts, his perspective was the only one in the book, until Dorst's wife insisted the female lead, Fiona, get more fleshed out as a character. His time under Stanford's Stegner writing fellowship may also have shaken things up a bit.
The ghosts, not zombies, that hang out in Colma have the option of passing on to the realms beyond if they want. All they have to do is eat a certain root, and this apparently bothers the Hollywood entities interested in the novel, because they want to know which root it is, a decision Dorst refuses to disclose on the grounds that he hasn't made it. The former lawyer turned writing teacher wouldn't dare lock himself into something like that after taking an advance for the book and feeling its pressure for the eight years it took to write the thing.
Concerns voiced by the audience about the ending of the novel did, however, force him to admit that he's considered creating an alternate ending, one that might give a clearer resolution, but if it took eight years to finish the original ending, another one wouldn't appear until 2017, just enough time for everyone in San Francisco to check out Alive in Necropolis from the library system. One city, one copy of the book. Put in your hold requests today.
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