I finished Gary Troup’s Bad Twin this afternoon, reading the last few pages on timeouts during the Pistons-Cavs game. Bad Twin blends with Lost; the book’s named author, Gary Troup, is presumed to have perished in the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, the same flight-gone-wrong that opens the first season of ABC’s popular TV show. The manuscript for BT has surfaced in a few of the episodes; as far as I can recall, only Hurley and Sawyer have read it. And now I have too.

Keeping loosely with detective fiction, BT is the story of a private eye hired by one brother to track down his twin (their birthdays, 8-15 and 8-16). The writing is, well, stylistically novel-gray; that is, I had the sense all along that what I was reading was drummed up by a team of writers who developed the manuscript to fit with the clues-to-tease plot progression shared with the show. It’s not terrible, as novels go, but neither is it memorable for its language or for the hook of getting lost in another’s mind at
work.

Still, I recommend it to other fans of Lost. It’s a fine example of transmedia, and a few of the clues in the novel go beyond the immediate storyarch, tying, as well, to the Lost universe. The Hanso Foundation and Chief Technologist Thomas Mittelwerk are mentioned. “Gary Troup,” also an anagram for purgatory, dedicates the book to Cindy, the flight attendant who is also his life’s love, and introduces a character named Cindy on a LAX-Sydney flight in the novel. The blending of the Troup’s fictive realm and the Lost universe brushes paths for much more speculation than I’ll tell here. Don’t want to spoil it. Plenty of literary allusions in BT, plenty of themes that entangle with the TV show, and enough pleasure to justify reading it for yourself if you’re happily hooked on the show, as I am.