1999

This book, written by one of my classmates, takes a very unique turn on conventional story telling. He tells the story through a very diverse set of media outlets (blogs, video/security cam recordings, search histories, etc.), which leaves the reader with a very empirical sense of reality, much lacking the full details. He does on purpose this to strongly emphasize the interactions between characters, but he chose to leave things like character appearances all up to the reader’s imagination.
In short, the story is a puzzle. Although the story itself is not too long, most of the time reading it you are thinking about how each piece of media relates with the other ones, thus creating the story. In the preface he compares the story to an investigation show, and it very much is like that. The evidence is presented to us, and we have to decide how the story looks. Not only does this really bring out a sense of mystery, but it really leaves the text up for interpretation by readers.
My only suggestion to you is that you should try to be more consistent with your formatting of each type of media, and refine the strategies you use in each of them. Toward the end, in one of the last video blogs, you all of a sudden started narrating details rather than just presenting dialogue, as all of the other video blogs were. Of course this narration seemed very necessary to advance the story, and those visual images definitely make sense (since it was a video blog), but you should have also included the visual component in the other video blogs in my opinion (since video is both audio AND visual, compared to a phone conversation, which is just audio).
I really like your idea of having multiple forms of media, especially because each type can tell you something different. If you were going to refine this, you need to stick to emphasizing these differences and make them more crucial to the understanding of what’s happening. For example, the phone calls would be useful to emphasizes a) the people are in different locations, b) the language is conversational, c) calling as opposed to texting usually means that it is something important. Another example, the diary emphasizes a) that the information is secret, b) that all diaries seem to be written TO someone, even though they aren’t, and c) you can show either that someone else is reading it OR that the person who wrote it is thinking about it. I really like that each type of media adds a different element of the story, and it was really great seeing how that played out.
Nice work Asad!

This book scared me half to death! I really enjoyed the plotline and the fact that its not super long. It's also worth noting that this is really good for a first book since it seems that the author hasn't published anything else.