Imagine X written by Y with a plot by Z

While listening to the radio during my commute the other morning, I heard the DJ do a live commercial for some new techno-thriller novel. This struck me as unusual. Though I’ve heard books promoted via commercial on the AM radio waves before, it hasn’t been too frequent. Part of the copy near the end read something like: “Imagine Catch-22 written by Hunter S. Thompson with a plot by Tom Clancy!”

Wow.

That’s “wow” in a “hmmmm” sense.

Seems to me the publisher is trying to gin up interest in the somewhat generically-titled book by making us think that THIS IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT. I don’t begrudge them that. I found the variables Catch-22, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Clancy to be intriguing, in fact, though I also, in fact, doubt the book is entirely a mashup of the three.

Anyway, that got me thinking.

See that book there to the right? My toe-dip into the waters of Kindle entitled Oncewhere Walked the Whale? How could I describe my magnum opus? How would a mythical publisher do so in a radio commercial?

How ’bout …

“Imagine The Iliad written by Jorge Luis Borges with a plot by J.R.R. Tolkien!”

“Imagine Breaking Bad written by Walt Whitman with a plot by Franz Kafka!”

“Imagine Atlas Shrugged written by Norman Vincent Peale with a plot by Dr. Seuss!”

“Imagine Moby Dick written by Kurt Vonnegut with a plot by George Orwell!”

or even

“Imagine The New Testament written by Robert Heinlein with a plot by John Le Carre!”

OK, confession time. I wrote down the first distinctive authors and books (and a TV show) that came to my mind and randomly paired them all up. It took about three minutes. Kinda fun. And, startlingly enough, they either describe my book perfectly to a T or have absolutely entirely nothing to do with it. It’s all up to you. In your mind.

Or is it?