If you haven't seen it, check out Godspy's coverage of TDVC. It hits TDVC from unique angles (which is difficult to do, given the swamp coverage it has received). I especially liked this piece by John Zmirak from earlier this month. Amy Welborn referred to Dan Brown as the "mystery man," since no one knows much about him. But Zmirak had lunch with one of Brown's old friends. Excerpt:
But Ted didn't rise to the bait. He just shook his head. “Dan Brown's not anti-Christian. He's not anti-anything. I doubt he's pro-anything, either, except pro-Dan Brown. That book has as much of an agenda as The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hockey. Dan Brown doesn't have enough conviction to make a decent agnostic. He grew up a faculty brat in New England, and I don't think he set foot off campus until he was in his 20s.”
I perked up, and ordered another beer. “You know Dan Brown?”
“I knew him for years. He started out as a joke-book author.” Ted said, dunking a clam-strip in tartar sauce. “Some of the jokes were funny. But he wanted to be a novelist. He kept pestering me about it, so finally I gave him this paperback, Writing the Blockbuster Novel, by Albert Zuckerman. It's a paint-by-numbers guide on how to write a page-turner. One important part of the formula was: Find a villain your readers can safely hate. A few months later, Dan brought me this manuscript to read–and it followed the formula precisely ”¦ as if he'd poured Jello into a mold. In this case, the 'safe villain' was the National Security Agency, government spies. It sold pretty well, and he kept on pounding out books–each time with a different 'safe villain.' Eventually, he started running out–Communism was gone, the Nazis were all dead”¦. That pretty much leaves the U.S. government, drug cartels, and the Catholic Church.”
