unspace, unchapters

the raw shark text's mysterious lost media haunts me

In 2007 I read Steven Hall’s debut novel The Raw Shark Texts. I had fortuitously just finished House of Leaves, and so was deeply primed for a book about weird liminal spaces, explorations at the edges of mundane reality, and a conceptual shark that dwells in the waterways of human thought and communication.

Shark is a hard novel to summarize, as that last sentence may indicate. You might call it high concept. The narrator has lost his girlfriend and his memory, and these things are related. After she died in a diving accident, he dedicated himself to exploring unspace — “the area under a manhole cover, abandoned warehouses, the corridors behind the shops in malls, storeroomes, dark tunnels, passageways, fire escapes, stairwells, elevators, old boarded up houses.” Liminal spaces, in sum, making the book a perfect read for our modern era in which liminal horror has become a major trend. Eric Sanderson, the amnesiac narrator, seems to have thought he could find some way of bringing his love back in these forgotten places. What he actually found was the aforementioned shark, which — as I said — moves through a conceptual space, surfing through words, hunting the sent of its prey through chains of association. It ate his memories, because that’s what it does.

The Raw Shark Texts is often considered ergodic literature, which broadly means “books where the text formatting is sometimes all weird.” House of Leaves is maybe the poster child for this microgenre; Shark does not rise anywhere near that book’s level of deliberate obscurantism, but it does play liberally with the layout of the text. At one point it becomes a flipbook where a shark made of words attacks you.

Like this

I am not going to mince words here: this is one of my favorite books of all time and very possibly the best book of — let’s call it “weird fiction” — published in the last twenty-odd years. The fact that it’s not better known makes me feel something like what I assume Marvel fans felt when Martin Scorcese made fun of Spider-Man or whatever. I like this thing so much that it’s become a bedrock facet of my personality. I spent half of high school and most of college hunting through mall backrooms and dark tunnels and climbing over rooftops to get to abandoned buildings because of this book. It’s incredible.

(Hall’s second book, 2021’s Maxwell’s Demon, is also incredible, but that deserves its own post).

Hall was very comitted to the themes of his book — unspace, duality, and exploration, among others. To that end, he announced that each of the 36 chapters in the novel would have a corresponding unchapter, or negative. These were supplemental chapters that supplied information omitted from the regular book. They weren’t deleted scenes — they were very much part of the novel, just not printed inside it. The dedicated Steven Hall forums immediately threw themselves into finding these, and the ground was rich: there were mysterious MySpace blogs, YouTube channels with obviously encoded videos, and a flurry of international editions which sometimes hid secrets. The Canadian and UK editions contained an “undex” (get it? index but un-?) which listed things not actually in the book and which both differed from one another. The original UK undex consisted of transparent sheets physically slipped into one in every-so-many copies. The Brazillian and Hebrew editions each contained a different unchapter. The author said he left another under a bench in Glossop, England, and another may have been stashed somewhere in a city square in the Netherlands. He also put one in a bottle and threw it in a lake.

And no one ever found them.

The mid-to-late 2000s was a big time for alternate reality games, or ARGS. 2007 was the same year that Nine Inch Nails launched its famous ARG for Year Zero, which revealed that the album was actually sent back in time from the dystopian future in which Bush never stopped being president and big hands were coming down from the sky. Among other things, the Year Zero ARG at one point involved an underground NiN show getting stormed by a SWAT team. What Hall was doing was not quite an ARG, and was certainly more than a marketing ploy, but it was not unusual for the time. What is unusual is that, 16 years later, it’s still unfinished.

By my count, and you must believe me when I say I have extensively researched this, only 7-9 of the 36 unchapters were ever located, and one of those only partially. The ones released as unique physical editions, like that taped under a bench in Glossop, disappeared entirely.

You may have noticed that I gave a range instead of a definite number. That’s because there’s some ambiguity as to whether, for example, an excerpt posted on a MySpace blog by an in-universe character named Eva Signet (an anagram for “negative”) counts as an unchapter. And the mention of MySpace reveals a problem more fundamental than the fact that no one found the note under the bench: the internet is dying.

Eva Signet’s blog, which by all accounts was a rich source of information and run either by the author himself or the book’s marketing company, is gone, a victim of the MySpace server migration which wiped out decades of internet history. It wasn’t caught by the Internet Archive (which may itself cease to exist), and so the only traces of it are quotations on other sites that were caught. The YouTube video, which contains a still-undeciphered code in one of its videos, is probably not long for this world after the website announced that it will begin deleting old accounts. The official Steven Hall forums where much of the initial work of discovering the negatives was done is, like the concept of forums in general, long dead. So is the secret page on his website, only some of which seems to be preserved on the IA. There were almost certainly unchapters hidden online, and they are almost certainly gone.

There’s a Raw Shark Texts subreddit, but it’s quiet. Hall very occasionally releases new negatives — one seems to have been included in a 500-printing limited edition of Shark a couple of years back — but his internet presence is limited to a single Instagram page, which has been quiet for nearly a year. As far as I can tell, the biggest discovery in the field of Raw Shark Texts studies in the last ten years was made by me, today, when I stumbled entirely by chance across a story Hall had published in a small anthology ten years ago. If it’s not a negative, it at least features the main character of Shark and provides a major clue to a major mystery in the text. [EDIT: I’ve spoken with Hall and he’s confirmed it is in fact a negative — Negative 10, to be exact). This story is not listed on his Wikipedia page or author biography; I have no idea how many more like it may be out there.

Oh, and according to the author in an interview, the book itself contains encoded hidden text that no one has ever deciphered.

I’m not sure where to go from here, except to hope that an anniversary edition of The Raw Shark Texts drops at some point and contains the lost bits of what I really think is one of the better novels this century. I’ve put together what I think is the most complete RST archive on the internet, including all of the discovered unchapters, on my Google Drive. If you read the book (which you should), and you like the book (which you should), I’d encourage you to check it out. If you’re at all like me, you’ll both be thrilled by the added bits to a book you love and deeply sad that most of it is lost, very probably forever.

Still, these absences are part of the book — its focus on gaps, unspace, holes — and part of its power. The first chapter of The Raw Shark Texts is titled “A Relic of Something Nine-Tenths Collapsed.” Eric Sanderson wakes up without his memories and never pieces together his whole story. Our quest for more negatives mirrors Sanderson’s quest in the book, and is all the more compelling for that. Still, without even a quiet hope that we actually will find more, there’s mostly just the sense of sadness and loss that I mentioned.

And if you’re Steven Hall, then I’m sorry about all the emails.

I am still not finished moving into this apartment