You know what a pitch meeting is? You sit down across the table from someone who might help you realize your dream of producing, publishing, writing a project and perhaps even quit your day job. This is your big chance, but the kicker is that they want to hear your vision in like bumper sticker form. Everything I need to know in a single sentence or phrase. You know – the tourettes detective (Motherless Brooklyn), the sort-of-amnesiac detective (Memento), the OCD detective (Monk), the singing detective (The uh Singing Detective). Or how about a cop trapped inside a hostage crisis in an office building (Die Hard) which then spins its own strain of pitches – Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57), Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege) on a train (Under Siege 2) on a bus, in a bathtub and on and on and on. Really, the greatest pitch has got to be when everything you need to know is included in the title -
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I've yet to master this kind of approach to selling my visions and frankly most of the things I gravitate toward in books or film or television, I have a hard time even imagining what the “pitch” might have been. This is where resentment on my part starts to set in. I begin thinking, well if you can contain the whole concept in a single sentence it’s gotta be bad. Shallow. Gimmicky.
But friends it is time to humble myself in the presence of a seriously high-quality, high-concept book. I know I’m way behind the wave with this one. I mean it's a couple years old already. And I knew from the recommendations I’ve had that it was something I was probably going to like, but nothing prepared me for just how high-octane everything about Josh Bazell’s debut Beat the Reaper is. The characters, the violence, the pacing and the language (can I say how much I like the profanity in this one?) Really, really like the gleefully profane and medically disgusting tone that permeates this tale. Afterward, I felt kinda like I did when I put down Duane Swierczynski’s The Blonde – like what the hell was that? What just happened? I want to go again. (It also made me want a novel from medical-gross out short story favorite Glenn Gray. Just sayin.)
And how’s this for concept: a former hitman now a doctor in witness protection finds a former mafia associate in his care at the worst hospital in New York. Should he kill him? Should he run? Should he tell us his long and convoluted story? The answer to all of these is ‘yes’ emphatically 'yes' and right now. There are elements so outrageous in this book that they become actual selling points rather than suspension-of-disbelief road blocks to enjoying it. The premise itself is so logically dubious that if it were fed to us straight up we probably wouldn’t keep reading. Thankfully that’s not the case. Wisely, Bazell chooses to bring us into the story and reveal the situation in baby steps and instead smacks us upside the head with the self confident snarkiness of the character’s tone and the audacity of his actions at the opening before telling us anything about the how or the why of the development of these traits in Dr. Peter Brown.
Another rocket propelled high-concept book from this year was Joe Hill’s Horns, which has, all due respect to Don Winslow’s Savages, the best succinct opening chapter of 2010 in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to find he’s grown horns and become a/the devil (Gregor Samsa should have been so lucky). Both Horns and Beat the Reaper employ the flash-back flash-forward narrative style to compliment and invest us in the books’ present tense, but where I felt that it slowed down and hampered the full-tilt momentum of Horns, I really couldn’t decide which narrative line was more interesting in Reaper.
And, as in all high-concept books that I really enjoy, in the end it comes down to the quality of the story telling and the writing. There are plenty of books with a conceptual hook that get me to pick them up, but far fewer are the number that I finish. And Bazell, kiddos, has chops. Mad, crazy, just sick writing chops. I'm already impatient for his next book high-concept or no. You sir, had me at f****head.
So, hey, wish me luck I’m off to pitch Nick and Nancy the Narcoleptic Narcs. Feel like I’ve really got a shot with this one.
What are your favorite high-concept books, movies, TV shows?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
