Just in time for Halloween, Tokyopop is releasing the English translation of the light novel Goth by Otsuichi. A manga adaptation of Goth was released in September, and a Japanese live-action adaptation of Goth is slated for release in Japan in December. Tokyopop's director of Marketing, Marco Pavia could not confirm rumors that Fox Atomic is making an American film based on Goth, but Variety reported on October 2nd that videogame writer JT Petty is signed on to write and direct the film.
The manga had a first print run of 15,000, and is in the top 200 on Bookscan. "It's a good start" says Pavia. The novel will have a first print run of 20,000. “Novels perform about two thirds as well as manga in terms of book sales,” Pavia told PW, adding that 12 Kingdoms is their top selling novel.
Best described as Nancy Drew meets Dexter (the Showtime TV series about a serial killer who catches other serial killers), Goth is about two twisted, death-obsessed high school students who continually get involved in gruesome murder cases. In the title story, the unnamed narrator and his classmate Morino find a serial killer's notebook. Instead of turning the notebook into the police, they attempt to find the next victim's body. Although the manga is a direct adaptation, it does not include all of the stories from the novel. Otsuichi writes in the manga postscript, "I'm going to inform the readers who enjoyed the manga version of Goth [that]in the novel, there are more stories that you don't know about, including some with different outcomes."
The dark themes of the story work well with the October release, as the book will be featured in Halloween display tables in Borders and Barnes and Noble. The manga will be included in an overall Halloween campaign on the Tokyopop website which includes Chibi Vampire, I Luv Halloween, and Battle Royale from the backlist, according to Pavia. For this title, Tokyopop also plans to use some viral marketing techniques in their online forums. Tokyopop has already started leaking clues into their forums to begin an alternate reality game.
American readers may recognize Otsuichi's name from his short story, "F-Sensei's Pocket", which appeared in the August issue of Del Rey's literary anthology, Faust. Otsuichi also wrote the manga The Chronicle of the Clueless Age, which was released by Tokyopop in February 2007. In the same year, Tokyopop also released Calling You, another novel and manga adaptation by Otsuichi. It was “not a best seller” said Pavia. Although Goth fits into the horror genre, the stories straddle a middle ground between mystery and horror. Unlike most light novels, it does not include any manga-style illustrations typical of the genre. In 2003, Goth won a Honkaku Mystery Prize, an annual award for best new wave mystery novel. (Otsuishi describes Honkaku mystery as "a subgenre of mystery focusing on deductions, tricks, and the surprising moment in which the truth is revealed.") In the novel's afterword, Otsuichi writes "…at the time I wrote [Goth], there were no prizes for which light novels would even be considered." He adds that when he was growing up, "light novels weren't considered proper books, but trashy things that only a child would read."
