In less than a decade, James Frey has been at least two distinct kinds of literary boogeymen. Everyone knows his name because Oprah excoriated him on national television once it was discovered that Frey's recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces contained fabricated elements. Trying to explain this moment in pop culture history to someone who was tuned out or too young to care at the time is a weird experience. Why did everyone care so much about Frey's transgressions? Because Oprah's Book Club was at one time a significant force in the national conversation, because the internet had just started unraveling the careers of a number of literary frauds, because Twitter had not been invented yet and so we had not yet gotten in the habit of wagging our fingers at a different person every day or so. For a time, Frey was a cartoon villain and the whole country hated him. He was a punchline, an example of How Not to Behave. But by the time Frey had published his first novel, Bright Shiny Morning, all that outrage had dissipated and left a slight whiff of ozone in its wake. Nobody really gave a shit.

It hasn't earned nearly the kind of publicity that Oprah brought to him, but the second boogeyman phase of James Frey's career is a lot more insidious and harmful to the culture than his fraudulent memoir phase. A few years ago, Frey decided to lean into his evilness and show literary culture the same level of disdain that the publishing industry showed him. He opened a fiction factory in which he came up with book franchise concepts and then hired young authors to write the novels for him. The highest-profile product of Frey's content farm to date has been I Am Number Four, an almost impossibly bland young adult series that was turned into the kind of generic film that demonstrates clear contempt for its audience. It's an unloved film. There has been no sequel.

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Now, the Wall Street Journal reports Frey has unearthed another book from the old content farm, and it's looking to be his splashiest book since the Million Little Pieces hullaballoo. The new novel's title, Endgame: The Calling, is so vague as to be specific. It's impressive that Frey managed to cram two cliches into a three-word title. (And let's not even talk about the book's tagline: "Endgame is real. Endgame is now." Holy shit.) What's the plot? Who cares! It presumably involves an endgame and a calling. Twitter is involved, and a treasure hunt. There's probably a white kid who is destined to be the most special person in recorded history, or whatever.

But the important thing about Endgame: The Calling is its media strategy. The Journal reports that when Endgame arrives in bookstores on October 7th, it will be accompanied with "a YouTube channel, 50 social-media accounts and a real-life puzzle. (A videogame will come soon after.)" If you solve the puzzle, Frey will hand-deliver a half million dollars in gold coins to you. This is the gimmick-iest gimmick in the history of gimmicks, a hook on top of a hook on top of an elevator pitch on top of a gust of hot air. And I can't imagine it will work: Have any of these multi-media platforms ever made the kind of splash that corporations expect? I can't think of a single one that's succeeded the way they were intended to succeed; everyone wants to come up with the next Star Wars or Marvel Comics, but those franchises are at least built on a piece of art that exists because someone wanted to communicate an idea. When your idea is that you want to dominate the publishing industry, your book has nothing to say.

I think Frey is in it for the money, of course. But I think Frey is also, on some level, looking for revenge. When he published Million Little Pieces, he often earnestly compared himself to Ernest Hemingway. Now that his wish to be known as a great writer will never be granted, he seems to be saying, he wants to burn the publishing industry to the ground. If he can't have your respect, he'll bathe in your hate.