The Big Door Prize: A Novel by M. O. Walsh, 2/5

When the TV show based on this novel committed the crime of a season-ending cliffhanger, followed by permanent cancellation, I hoped to find the closure and answers I wanted so desperately by reading the book. Unfortunately, there is so little similarity between the two that it actually raised more questions than it answered, such as why on earth would the show writers keep the same weirdly unrelated title when they were planning to change almost everything else about the story? I am not exaggerating–saying the show is based on this book is the equivalent of creating a sci-fi series about a time-traveling jeweler and saying it’s based on Lord of the Rings.

Now, this cannot be a fair review of the novel because I admittedly spent the first half of it struggling to re-picture all the characters, and the rest trying to reconcile the vast differences between the charming TV series I had enjoyed and the bleak, depressing, comparatively unimaginative plot of the novel.

SPOILERS AHEAD

So how does the story actually end? Well, I read a lot of Reddit threads on the topic and was surprised that practically no one provided a detailed answer to this question, possibly because the answer is not revealed until the last few pages of a book that is almost unbearably dull in comparison to the show. In the novel, it is revealed that the obnoxious town photographer, Bruce “Deuce” Newman (the character on whom the show’s “Giorgio” is loosely based), created the DNAMIX (Morpho) machine as part of an art project to capture images of all the townspeople and use them to create a giant mosaic of Cherilyn (Cass), with which he hoped to win her love by displaying it at the town’s bicentennial celebration. At first, he entertained himself by writing specific “potentials” for people, but eventually he just set it to random. The book ends with him moving on from his obsession with Cherilyn, who renews her relationship with her husband, Douglas Hubbard (Dusty). In a less-uplifting subplot, Trina fails in her attempt to frame Jacob as a school shooter in punishment for sexual abuse resulting from his now-dead twin brother’s abandonment of her at a drunken high school party.

Why I read it: to get closure for the cancelled TV show based on the novel.