We Tell Stories on the Web
We Tell Stories is a very interesting project. The publishing house Penguin has recruited some of the UK’s best young writers to create six short stories inspired by literary classics, but featuring web tools, blogs and games. The digital part has been entrusted to the alternate reality games company SixtoStart, with an excellent result.
The first story is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, inspired by John Buchan’s thriller The 39 Steps. It utilizes Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the protagonist, a young Londoner, who witnesses a murder and is obliged to smuggle a mysterious substance onto a plane. The second work is Toby Litt’s Slice, based on M R James’ ghost story The Haunted Dolls’ House. Lisa (Slice for her friends), has moved from US to London with her parents. They live in a old house where strange and creepy things happen. Is it an haunted house? You can follow the story on Slice’s and her parents’ blogs or on Twitter. You can also interact with the characters.
The other authors involved in the project are Kevin Brooks, Nicci French, Matt Mason and Mohsin Hamid. In the next weeks they will submit their works. They will respectively take inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and the anonymous Tales from the 1001 Nights. For sure, there will be other good stuff on We Tell Stories.
