Fiction into fact into fiction

THIS SEASON, the TV drama "Lost" will make pop culture history when it becomes the first show ever to have a character write a book in the real world. Hyperion (a division of Disney, which owns ABC, which airs "Lost") plans to release "Bad Twin," a mystery novel credited to one Gary Troup, who, the publisher informs us, was a passenger on "Oceanic Flight 815, which was lost in flight from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles in September 2004."

Although that air disaster is the genesis point of "Lost," the event from which the entire series unfolds, Troup is hardly a central figure in the action -- in fact, he's not a living presence at all. He died in the plane crash, leaving behind the manuscript of his private-eye story, which will be found in the wreckage during an episode this spring. The discovery of this manuscript will magically overlap with the novel's release date.

Television, of course, has long been a source of publishing tie-ins. Back in college, I used to swear by "The Twilight Zone Companion," and there are all those "Star Trek" books. "Lost" exists in this tradition. Barely a year after debuting, it's already spawned several spinoff novels as well as "The Lost Chronicles: The Official Companion Book."

"Bad Twin," however, is a different sort of project, a novel that neither explains nor expands upon the show but seeks to be an authentic artifact. In the Hyperion catalog, it merits a two-page spread, complete with invented blurbs from nonexistent writers ("Sure to be a classic of the genre," says Bob Miller, which happens to be the name of the president of Hyperion), and bio information that lists the fictional Troup's credits and sales.

As to who actually is writing "Bad Twin," no one at the imprint will discuss it, although the buzz on various "Lost"-related websites is that it's the work of mystery novelist Ridley Pearson. That conjecture is supported by a catalog reference to "The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer," a novel Pearson wrote for Hyperion as the prequel to ABC's 2002 miniseries "Rose Red."

On the one hand, "Bad Twin" represents a further twist on horizontal marketing, in which a media company uses one holding to sell another. This is how we live now, in a world where everything is commodified and the bottom line has become, well, the bottom line.

Still, I can't help but be reminded of the scene in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" when the fireman Montag finds his wife studying her part in an interactive soap opera to be aired on the walls of their living room.