Writing about pop culture and current technology is always a gamble, pitting critique of the present against longevity, a story that will still feel relevant after we’re gone. But for novelists (present company included) who were exposed to the Real World before the, um, real world, reality TV is hardly a trend. We’ve grown up seeing ordinary people use the medium to solve myriad problems–or create them. And who among us hasn’t considered how we’d fare on Survivor, or snarkily judged a dish we’ve only watched being prepared? The past year has seen a notable wave of books that incorporate television—and particularly reality TV—into their premises, though examinations of the medium go back farther than you might expect.
In my novel, The Invisible World, Eve and Ryan Hawthorne suspect their house is haunted, and they reach out to a reality show…
