The Videographer

by Jason Rapczynski

A New York film school dropout falls into a job setting up spycams and porn shoots for a shady underground video producer. His plans to escape the low-brow webcast world go awry, however, when a young runaway claiming to be his daughter arrives at his door, triggering a series of events eerily similar to a movie script he wrote years earlier. While his life begins to unravel, he furiously seeks the truth about the girl, her missing mother, his increasingly sinister boss, and his own uncertain identity.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Marissa Barbieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first published work of fiction written by someone I know! Jay won the 3-Day Novel contest with this one, which I am happy to say I quite enjoyed (because otherwise that would just be awkward). For a slender tome (as they say), it packs in a goodly amount in the way of both character development and plot, all with a voice distinctly Jay's own. Sandy Claus may be dropping this in more than one stocking on my list this year!

[Jacob Seifert · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was good, but the story was too meandering and unfocused. For a 133-page novella, we sure get a lot of backstory that did little than show us what an uninteresting person the narrator was. I think this could have been a much better full-length novel, giving the various plot threads actual time to breathe and develop into something more.