The Book of Waste is the latest interactive story in multimedia from Dreaming Methods. It's a brooding hypertext, with pieces of stories distributed into short stories, then into sequences within them. Stories range from rural horror (maybe) to urban isolation and teen anxiety. There's some cross-hatching by theme and tone, along with some game hints (a code number).
As usual with Dreaming Methods, the multimedia presentation is excellent. The sound is especially effective, persistent and rich. Each story appears with a different hypertext mapping scheme, sometimes hooked into the text. Stories appear as text layered on top of images, each lexia combined with one or two images, which can move uneasily. Media appear as narrative structures, such as the story using video as a metaphor, or the tale nearly hidden within an audio tape. The whole thing is presented as beta, with two stories posing as incomplete, but it's hard to say if this is really a work in process or just the expression of all of these fictions' cumulative suffering and failure.
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