Escape!
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Everybody gets the story arc they deserve.
Kent Duvall, a faded reality show winner, just wants another chance at glory – to find his way out of his depressing life and back to his highlight reel. When a scandal is captured on camera at a charity event, he gets his shot, on a new jungle survival show with seven other contestants. Each of them has been cast as a type – Ruddy the bully, Miriam the nerd, Ashley the love interest – but everyone is more than they appear.
The contestants' goals seem simple – survive the wild, build a raft, win treasure. But Beck Bermann, a reality producer who suffered her own public shaming, sees them as characters in her redemption arc.
As the schemes and strategies spiral out, breakout camps sabotage each other and rival producers struggle to control the storyline. Soon the question becomes less about who will win than who will make it out in one piece.
Stephen Fishbach is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer and former television executive. A two-time Survivor USA contestant (voted onto the show the second time by more than ten million fans), he’s worked on the network side as a vice president at MTV and freelanced for a reality producers’ trade group. He cohosts a weekly Survivor podcast as well as the literary podcast Paraphrase. Stephen graduated with honours from Yale and received an MFA in fiction at NYU. In 2009 he was named one of People magazine’s hottest bachelors. His short story “To Sharks” – an excerpt from Escape! – was published by One Story and garnered Stephen the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two daughters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fishbach, a cast member on two seasons of Survivor, blends satire and adventure in his propulsive debut novel. Kent Duvall, winner of the reality TV survival show Endure 15 years earlier, dreams of returning to his former glory. After he's caught cheating on his wife with Ashley, the first-cut contestant from Endure's most recent season, his only shot at redemption is to play the hero on a new show in development called Escape ("Or maybe it's Escape! with an exclamation point," a producer explains. "The network's marketing team is still debating that one"). He signs on, with Ashley cast as his bombshell love interest. Fishbach shuffles perspectives between Kent and producer Beck Bermann, who claims to care about the contestants' real-life stories, but pushes them hard to follow planned story arcs, as with scientist Miriam, whom the show portrays as gangly and awkward for comedic relief. As Ashley, Kent, Miriam, and the other contestants face starvation, interpersonal conflict, and monsoons, the novel builds to a surprising twist. This tense tale makes good use of the author's firsthand knowledge of reality TV.
