46 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick CarmanSkeleton Creek
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Skeleton Creek Series
The Skeleton Creek series is a young adult mystery series and ghost story written by best-selling American author Patrick Carman. The books record the adventures of local teens Ryan McCray and Sarah Fincher as they uncover of the history of their small town, Skeleton Creek, Oregon. More than a simple murder mystery, the protagonists’ investigation reveals a secret society, a conspiracy, and a history steeped in gold, greed, and corruption that spreads beyond the town and across the country.
The series consists of five transmedia novels. The print book includes Ryan’s first-person account of events as a written journal with dated entries and access passcodes for Sarah’s online video diaries, available for viewing at sarahfincher.com. A film trailer and overview of each novel is available at skeletoncreek.com.
The five-book series includes Skeleton Creek (2009), Skeleton Creek: The Ghost in the Machine (2009), Skeleton Creek: The Crossbones (2010), Skeleton Creek: The Raven (2011), Skeleton Creek: The Phantom Room (2014), and a companion book, Skeleton Creek Is Real: The Shocking Truth Revealed (2014). Unlike most series fiction, the first and second Skeleton Creek novels are a two-volume arc. Skeleton Creek sets up the initial mystery (the death of Joe Bush) and introduces the suspects. The Ghost in the Machine resolves the whodunit, though the death of Joe Bush is not the crime that is resolved. Instead, the second vook reveals that Henry has been dressing as Joe Bush to scare away people from the Dredge, where a large treasure of gold remains hidden. The real ghost of Joe Bush protects the gold and helps Ryan and Sarah in future books.
Each subsequent novel in the series further unravels more of the conspiracies in Skeleton Creek with some plot twists regarding the discoveries the teens make in the initial two-volume arc. For example, rather than the Crossbones being a dangerous group of criminals, Book #3, Skeleton Creek: The Crossbones, reveals the group was founded to protect and preserve historical treasures. The ghost of Joe Bush continues to make appearances, leaving clues for Ryan to unravel and solve mysteries while Sarah goes away for film camp, visiting various haunted sites along the way. The final vook introduces a new figure called the Raven, and Ryan and Sarah attempt to discover the Raven’s identity after Sarah’s parents move to another state. The third and fourth vooks can be read as stand-alone novels and contain little development of the series’ initial plot.
The companion vook Skeleton Creek Is Real references an urban legend and claims the series is based on real events. The vook includes 20 additional videos as evidence. This additional material reinforces the genre components of the ghost story by providing “evidence” of the events recorded in Ryan and Sarah’s journals. However, the ghost story and supernatural elements of the series become less pronounced in each installment, as the overarching story of the conspiracy becomes the narrative focus. The companion novel offers a return to the original concept with an emphasis on the ghost of Old Joe Bush and the haunting of the Dredge.
Genre Context: The Epistolary Novel
The epistolary novel is written as a series of letters. The form was popularized in the 18th century by English writer Samuel Richardson. It is a form used by popular 19th-century Gothic, or horror, novels, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Other well-known epistolary novels are referenced in Carman’s vook as the passwords to Sarah’s video diaries. These include an allusion to Lucy Westenra, a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and an allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Contemporary epistolary novels may also include digital documents such as the emails and other printouts that Ryan adds to his journal, or even radio, blog, and video posts such as the access passwords for Sarah Fincher’s video diaries provide in Skeleton Creek.
Epistolary novels appear in one of three forms: monologic, dialogic, or polyphonic. Monologic epistolary novels focus on a single perspective and include only the entries of one character within a story. Dialogic epistolary novels create a dialogue between two characters who use the entries to communicate, as seen in books like Skeleton Creek, with Ryan’s print journal and Sarah’s video diaries composed as communication between characters. In addition to providing two narrative perspectives, the dialogue between Sarah and Ryan controls the pace of the mystery and enhances the supernatural elements of the ghost story. The final form of epistolary is polyphonic and includes entries for three or more characters.
The epistolary form is often used to add an additional element of realism, since the entries record aspects of everyday life. This adds an element of authenticity to the events recorded in Skeleton Creek and reinforces the genre aspects of the ghost story surrounding the history of Old Joe Bush, encouraging the reader to question whether the events actually occurred. The series’ realism is strengthened by the addition of the final vook Skeleton Creek Is Real, where the author gives new evidence in the form of additional videos that continue to challenge the fictional status of the series, linking his characters to another urban legend—which is also fictional but deepens the series’ lore.
Literary Context: Transmedia Storytelling
Transmedia storytelling is also sometimes called transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling. It is a technique that combines digital technology with print to tell a single, hybrid story—the novel form is sometimes referred to as a vook, short for video book. In Skeleton Creek, Carman adds transmedia elements through various typographical manipulations that indicate digital additions as well as the illustrations that accompany the video-diary passwords. Other more obvious transmedia elements in Skeleton Creek include Sarah’s videos, available at the website sarahfincher.com. The website was created before the release of the novel. While no new additions have been added to the site since the completion of the Skeleton Creek series, the site continues to be available and maintained.
Romantic and Gothic writers used similar techniques in marketing their work. For Pamela, Richardson produced prints, paintings, themed playing cards, and other products. Wilkie Collins, author of the classic Gothic novel The Woman in White (1859), had a hat and dress similar to those the heroine wore and “Woman in White” perfume produced. These were pop-culture works in their day and were written and marketed with mass appeal in mind. Carman uses similar strategies in Ryan’s journal with the addition of illustrations of emails and newspaper clippings drawn to appear as though they have been added as artifacts to the journal. Carman’s decision to write Skeleton Creek as Ryan’s journal with Sarah’s transmedia additions are linked to this intertextual history, an allusion to the direct influence of 18th- and 19th-century storytelling on today’s literature.
All content within a transmedia narrative is synchronized to create a comprehensive narrative timeline. For example, Ryan’s journal provides the main perspective and ordering of events, but the journal gives access to Sarah’s video diaries at specific moments in the story to supplement and deepen this perspective. While Ryan introduces and references the videos immediately before and after these moments in his journal, he does not narrate the specific events the video diary records. Instead, Sarah’s videos provide important characterization and events that develop and progress the main narrative.
The study of transmedia storytelling was introduced by communication scholar Henry Jenkins in his book Convergence Culture (2007). Transmedia analysis blends semiotics, or the study of signs and interpretation of sense production, with the narrative analysis of print media to reach a comprehensive interpretation of a story. For example, Ryan’s emphasis on the sound of the video he watches with the password “pitandpendulum” suggests the impact of the sensory elements upon a reader/viewer, explaining that “listening to those sounds again and again is like feeling [his] memory come unstuck in a way the written word is unable to accomplish (73). Carman includes several passages that highlight the benefits of transmedia storytelling as a form of media and includes a thematic emphasis on this as well, interrogating The Relationship Between Print, Digital, and New Media.
Ryan also concludes some journal entries with a note about the steps he takes to hide his media searches and usage from his parents, noting how easy these manipulations are (60). Sarah also adds notes to this effect in some of her emails that appear in Ryan’s journal. This suggests a generational divide that Carman has argued exists between the literate behaviors of teens and adults, an issue the author explains as impacting his preference for transmedia storytelling (Carman, Patrick. “NCTE Talks Skeleton Creek.” 7 Aug. 2019).
