This 7-figure sale is getting the Netflix treatment
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Logline: A sleep specialist is the final hope to wake up a suspected murderer who’s been asleep for four years.
About: Today’s book is from debut author, Matthew Blake. Blake worked in politics for ten years but like a lot of you, secretly wanted to be a writer. His debut book, Anna O., had everyone going nuts, with multiple publishers coming in with 7 figure offers. If we could all be so lucky! Concurrently, super producer Greg Berlanti snatched up the book to turn into a TV series for Netflix. The Netflix deal makes sense. Not only is Berlanti a producer on the breakout Netflix hit, “You,” the streamer is currently the only kid on the block without a high-profile mystery-thriller show. So did they make the right move picking this one up?
Author: Matthew Blake
Details: 420 pages
The big reason I’m reviewing this book today is that writing a mystery novel and turning it into a TV series is currently one of the best paths for writers to make a lot of money.
Streamers are DYING for these shows.
But how do you come up with one of these mystery ideas? Haven’t they all been done already? Apparently not! When Matthew Blake learned that the average human spends 33 years of their life asleep, he felt like he’d found an untapped idea market. And thus Anna O. Was born.
Dr. Benedict Prince (Ben) is a sleep doctor. Maybe the best in the world. Which is why he’s recruited by the famous Abbey Sleep Center to look over their newest patient, Anna Ogilvy, also known throughout the world as “Sleeping Beauty.”
4 years ago, Anna O. killed two people during one of those team-building retreats but when the cops showed up, Anna was asleep. It turns out Anna has been a lifelong sleepwalker, so the assumption is that she killed the victims when she was sleepwalking. No problem, we’ll get to the bottom of this when she wakes up. Except Anna doesn’t wake up. In fact, she’s been asleep for FOUR YEARS.
After everybody and their mom (including her own mom) try to wake Anna up, people lose hope. However, Ben wrote some papers on sleep that have made some waves in the community. Which is why Ben is now appointed Anna’s primary doctor. He’s the last chance they have at waking her up.
The book takes us through different points of view, mainly Ben’s, as he uses his 3-pronged ‘wake-up’ formula (touch, listen, smell) to tempt Anna out of sleep. The main way that Ben is different from all the other sleep doctors is that he believes you have to use the ‘mind’ not the ‘brain’ to wake someone up. Whatever the hell that means.
We also hear from ex-wife Clara, a cop who was called to the scene of the famous murder. There’s a mysterious blogger constantly dropping tips about Sleeping Beauty on Reddit that she can’t possibly know. We even hear from Anna herself, whose journal leading up to the night’s events is drip-fed to us entry by entry.
It appears that Anna, an aspiring writer, was working on a story about the infamous 1999 murder of a woman who killed both of her stepchildren while sleepwalking. Anna’s journal entries indicate that she was getting close to figuring out the truth to that murder. Could Anna’s sleep-induced nightmare be tied to a murder from 20 years ago? And is Ben being 100% honest about his relationship with Anna? The answers are dependent on Anna waking up.
You know, sometimes the world just confuses me.
I have a solid feel for the screenwriting world. I know, for example, when a crappy script sells, that there are three likely reasons why it happened. I understand those reasons and therefore I can write the sale off as following some form of logic.
But I always thought that novel-writing required pure talent. You needed to be able to actually write. Because, unlike a script, which is just a blueprint for what the finished product will look like, a novel IS the finished product. So you’d think it would need to be, you know, good.
Maybe I’m overreacting here. I suppose I should give Blake credit for the insane amount of research he’s done. I could tell that this man knows more about sleep than 99% of the people on the planet.
But for God’s sake, THIS PLOT! This plot is so wacky and stupid. I’m not even convinced the concept works! This girl kills someone while sleepwalking. Then she wakes up momentarily to see what she’s done. Then she falls asleep for 4 straight years. What???
Those are two completely different things, both of them incredibly rare. What are the odds of both happening at once?
Someone paid a million bucks for this. I can see thousands of novelists everywhere shaking their heads in fury. You mean *THIS* is all we had to do to become millionaires? Come up with a flashy premise that only vaguely resembles a story??
The book obviously wants to be Gone Girl but – and I’m going to regurgitate what I always say on this site – the reason that Gone Girl was good was because it was SIM-PLE. Girl goes missing. Her diary proves her husband is the murderer. Midway through we learn that the diary was made up and she orchestrated her own disappearance.
This book is just… what the hell. It has sixteen million twists! Every few chapters, there’s another twist. If every plot beat is a twist, the twists stop mattering. What makes twists work is that they are singular. We work our way up to them, carefully setting them up, and that’s why they hit us like a ton of bricks.
It’s a very first-time writer thing to do — twist twist twist twist twist. You do that when you’re not confident as a writer, when you don’t believe in your story. You’re constantly thinking, “Am I doing enough? Is this boring? It’s too boring. I have to make something happen!”
Good writers are confident that they’ve built characters compelling enough that we’ll want to stay with them even when crazy things aren’t happening. I mean, these characters WEREN’T compelling enough for that. But if you can’t even write characters, what are you doing writing a book?
There was really only one thing that worked – the suspense that was built up for Anna waking up. Despite despising every contrived chapter that was written, I kept reading because I wanted to see what happened when Anna woke up. And for about three chapters there, when she woke up, the book actually worked. It, of course, fell apart immediately after. But a 3-chapter win streak for a writer of this caliber is admirable.
By the way, Anna wakes up at the midpoint. So at least he got that part right (have something big happen at the midpoint of your story).
Here’s my guess at what happened and you book experts can let me know if I’m right. Books like this are never meant to be books. They’re created to become movies or TV shows. The purchase of the book by the publishing house acts as a dual-purpose publicity push that gets eyes on the sale that can then be concurrently used to push the book around town in the hopes of securing a movie/show deal.
In that sense, I suppose this works. We’ve got a high concept here. A screenwriter buddy of mine who adapts high-profile material has reminded me that lots of good movies are adapted from weak books because you get to pick and choose the best parts.
I don’t know if any screenwriter can possibly save this book, though. This is trashy weak overly-twisty unconfident writing in its purest form, the kind of thing that if it does make it all the way to Netflix, will be lucky to crack a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The ending alone, with its 96,000 twists, has a good shot at sending half its audience into their own 4-year slumber. A 4-year slumber of stupidity.
The only positive I can take out of this is that it proves you clearly don’t need to be a good writer to make millions of dollars. But the weaker you are, the flashier your concept has to be. That’s all this book had going for it. I guess it was enough.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: One of the things I’ve found while reading books is that good authors integrate their research into the plot. So if you’re researching people who have been asleep for a long time and you come across a particularly interesting real-life case? Figure out a way to work that case into your story. That’s what Blake does. This could’ve just been about Anna’s case. But Blake found another case through research that he decided to work into the plot – the sleep case from 20 years earlier when the mother killed her step-children while sleepwalking.
