Unseen: Door to Alternity occupies a very complicated position in terms of the discourse and text worlds that surround it. Following an unsuccessful 1992 movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer made its television debut in 1997. After three seasons, a central character, Angel, left and was given an eponymous spin-off show. Both shows gained a large and devoted audience, and tie-in novels, comics and graphic novels began to appear immediately. Unseen is a 2001 trilogy of ‘crossover’ novels, featuring the characters and relationships as they stand at the end of Season Four of Buffy and Season One of Angel, and set in both their respective locations of Sunnydale, a fictional town in the California Valley, and Los Angeles. In addition, Door to Alternity is the second book of the trilogy. It is therefore clear that the reader of Unseen: Door to Alternity will be expected to bring a large amount of detailed background knowledge to the discourse process; the authors can reasonably assume that he or she is a regular viewer of Buffy and Angel, and has read the first book in the trilogy, The Burning. This essay will examine how the text triggers such background information during its prologue and opening chapter, and how this affects the construction of the text world. It will also look at an instance of ‘world repair’ later in the book.

The Prologue is incidental to the main story that runs through the trilogy, and does not feature any of the main characters. It is therefore descriptive, relying heavily on world-building elements. The place is explained as ‘Cowtown Burger Ranch’, a fast food restaurant in Los Angeles (from this the reader can infer California, USA, as well as associations with Hollywood, a twenty-four-hour city lifestyle and the TV series Angel). The time is Friday night, or rather Saturday morning, since it is after two a.m. The only character in the opening passage is Michael Buckley, who, the text tells the reader, is nineteen, tall, thin and eager to get out of fast food; who has worked since nine and will work (a future-time sub-world) until six; who is one of the few staff to be over eighteen and so eligible for the graveyard shift; who gets ten cents an hour extra for being over eighteen; who wears a paper sheriff’s hat to work. The tone of the second paragraph implies it comes from Michael’s consciousness – this sub-world is tinted with sarcasm. This view into his character-accessible thought-world makes the reader feel closer to him, and his self-disgust inspires sympathy. In addition, the regular customers of the restaurant are described in a series of world-building propositions. This descriptive start allows the reader to construct a new text world for this new character and setting. In fact, it lasts a mere eight pages, and is collapsed as the trilogy’s story resumes, but is richly detailed because of all its world-building elements.

Chapter One opens very much in medias res, with just one world-building element to orientate the reader: the place, Los Angeles. The first sentence contains an important function-advancing proposition, that police officers ‘held guns aimed at Buffy, Riley and Angel.’ However, no information is given about the police officers or the people at whom they are aiming, or how they got there. This is not an unusual technique for the beginning of a novel, since it piques the reader’s curiosity and so encourages him or her to read on. The difference here is that because it is the second book of a trilogy, and moreover features characters already well-known to the reader, not many world-building elements are subsequently provided.

The function-advancing propositions continue: headlights illuminate the alley, Riley puts his hands in the air, Riley turns to the nearest pair of cops, Riley speaks. The narration then creates a epistemic sub-world by shifting into indirect thought, so that the scene is construed through Angel’s point of view; this is signalled typographically by italicising the first reported thought: ‘Speak for yourself’’. Though the next paragraph is not all indirect thought, it remains within the character-accessible sub-world of Angel’s perceptions of the scene: the policemen are named because he knows them, and his opinion of them is presented as fact: ‘Bo Peterson, crooked cop…Peterson’s comrades in corruption’. An embedded epistemic sub-world is created by the hypothetical opener ‘If Angel had been alone…’. The narration shifts back to Angel’s thoughts, then briefly into the main text world as one of the policeman calls out and Riley speaks again. Again the narration returns the reader to Angel’s sub-world: ‘…Angel supposed…’. The reader learns more about Angel’s background knowledge of the policemen before another hypothetical sub-world is created: ‘Chances were good that if they were put into a police car now…’. At the end of the paragraph, indirect thought is again represented in italics, this time marking a permanent move out of the sub-world.

The above is an inadequate description of what is happening in this passage, however, since the reader is inferencing large amounts throughout these opening paragraphs. It could be said that Door to Alternity exists within a larger text world of the Unseen trilogy, and that the trilogy exists within an primary text world that includes all Buffy the Vampire Slayer programmes, spin-offs and tie-ins. This top-level text world has been named the ‘Buffyverse’ by fans, and it has its own consistent rules and mythologies, to which a reader of Door to Alternity will be constantly referring. After four seasons of Buffy and one of Angel, there is also a considerable history that the reader can build their text worlds upon.

In this way the location of Los Angeles and the presence of police officers will trigger in the reader knowledge about the first series of Angel, during which the title character regularly experiences problems with the police. When Riley turns to the officers ‘with a friendly smile on his face’, not only will the reader easily be able to visualise that smile, thanks to having seen the actor Marc Blucas on their screens regularly, his behaviour will seem entirely consistent with the ‘Buffyverse’ characterisation of Riley. This is made more explicit shortly, when Angel mentally remarks that ‘His Initiative experience had…given him an affinity for law enforcement’. This triggers the reader’s knowledge of what the Initiative is – a secret military division, of which Riley was a member, devoted to controlling the menace of demons and vampires that appeared in Sunnydale during Season Four of Buffy. Riley became Buffy’s boyfriend and drifted away from the Initiative, but still has a military approach to fighting. Devotees will also know that Angel (Buffy’s ex-boyfriend) and Riley met in an episode of Buffy, ‘The Yoko Factor’, and took a great dislike to each other; recollections of this encounter will be triggered by Angel’s annoyed thought, ‘Speak for yourself.’ It should be noted that many fans felt the same way about Riley, and it is therefore probably not a coincidence that his actions are viewed from Angel’s hostile point of view.

Readers would need background knowledge to make sense of Angel’s thoughts relating to bullets; specifically they would need to know that he is a vampire, and in the ‘Buffyverse’ vampires cannot be killed by bullets. His reference to Buffy being ‘Slayer-tough’ also harks back to the fundamental rules of the ‘Buffyverse’ – the chosen vampire slayer is supernaturally strong – but could not be understood by an uninitiated reader. Thus it can be seen that, though all text worlds rely to some extent on inferences by the reader, the first chapter of Door to Alternity expects the reader to use very specialised background knowledge to construct a coherent text world.

Later in the novel there is a passage with a deliberately surprising ‘twist’ (Extract Three). The location is given as Sunnydale, to orientate the reader’s text world, or perhaps return them to a sub-world set in this location. The reader might expect Buffy to be the dominant character, since this is her hometown, and the text immediately confirms this, making her the subject of the first sentence. The description of ‘the young man’s face’ seems to be detailed, but in fact is carefully constructed to be generic, so as not to trigger the reader’s vivid mental representations of the young male characters in Sunnydale, formed by the television programmes and reinforced by the book.

The narration then creates a sub-world in which Buffy’s thoughts are narrated as indirect thought. Each thought is introduced by a modal lexical verb in the simple past: ‘she couldn’t imagine…she found herself wishing…she knew’. The first sentence implies a history for the text world level above it, but since it is in a character-accessible sub-world it cannot be entirely relied upon; this is important for the surprise that disrupts the text world and necessitates world repair. In addition, an embedded epistemic sub-world is created by the hypothetical clause introduced by ‘wish’, then collapsed by the more positive verb ‘know’.

The first paragraph is constructed to give the reader the impression that Buffy is in a romantic situation, so there is an abrupt shock to the text world at the start of the second paragraph, when it becomes apparent that Buffy is literally holding the man’s face in her hands, that it is detached from its owner. Two factors in the previous paragraph set the reader up for this surprise: the vagueness of the face’s description, and the narration through Buffy’s context-specific thoughts allow a misunderstanding to develop. The second paragraph requires the text world to be renegotiated so that the ‘true’ situation emerges, a process that has been identified as world-repair. After the reader has dealt with this, the narration continues: a sub-world of intended future action is briefly created by Buffy vowing to find the creature responsible for the young man’s death. The next sentence is a statement of fact, but the deictic marker ‘here’ signals that it is still indirect thought, relating Buffy’s point of view. The final sentence in this section still relates to Buffy’s internal state – ‘Buffy was fed up with them’ – but seems again more externally observed, completing the process of returning the reader to the main text world, where the action picks up.

This kind of novel – part of a trilogy, and based on a televisual world already well-known to the reader – clearly operates differently in the way it negotiates a text-world with the reader. Though sometimes it may create a world with traditional world-building elements such as location, time and attributes of the characters and objects present, when dealing with familiar characters and places it instead concentrates on function-advancing elements and exploiting the reader’s prior knowledge through knowing cues. In fact, what to an uninitiated reader might seem a world-building detail becomes to the habitué of the ‘Buffyverse’ a function-advancing proposition, because he or she can infer attitude, motivation and possible reactions from a small detail about a regular character. In this way, the discourse between the authors and the readers of such a book is unlike a conventional author-reader one; it could be said to be closer in spirit to discourse between friends, full of subtle references and in-jokes and based on an assumption of a large amount of shared knowledge. This may be what gives fiction such as this its unique quality and its specific appeal.

As Text World Theory begins to consider genres other than the novel, and its practitioners test the possibilities of applying it to other creative arts such as song or cinema, crossover genres such as tie-in fiction may form an important bridge, and demonstrate how text worlds can extend beyond the creations in which they originate.

Gavins, Joanna, ‘Absurd Tricks with Bicycle Frames in the Text World of The Third Policeman’, Nottingham Linguistics Circular 15 (2000), pp. 17-33

Holder, Nancy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide Volume Two (London: Pocket Books) 2000

Holder, Nancy and Jeff Mariotte, Unseen: Door to Alternity (London: Pocket Books) 2001

Golden, Christopher and Nancy Holder, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide (London: Pocket Books) 1998

Topping, Keith, Hollywood Vampire, second edition (London: Virgin Books) 2001

Topping, Keith, Slayer, second edition (London: Virgin Books) 2002

Werth, Paul, ‘"World Enough and Time": Deictic Space and the Interpretation of Prose’ in P Verdonk and JJ Weber (eds.), Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context (London: Routledge) 1995, pp. 181-205

Extract One: Prologue, page 1.

Friday nights were always busy at Cowtown Burger Ranch, and this one was no exception. Tall, thin, and eager to get the hell out of fast food as soon as he could scrape some bucks together, Michael Buckley had been on shift since nine, and he would stay until six in the morning. He worked through the late dinner crowd, and then the rush at two, when the bars closed down and the hard-core drinkers came in for some greasy food to supplement their liquid diets. At nineteen, Michael was one the few people on staff who could work the graveyard shift – eighteen and older only.

Lucky him; he got an extra ten cents an hour for being such a loser that at nineteen, he wore a paper sheriff’s hat to work.

~~~

Extract Two: Chapter One, pages 9-10.

Police officers at either end of the short alley held guns aimed at Buffy, Riley and Angel. Headlights and floodlights from their cars washed the alley with stark white light. Riley was the first to put his hands in the air, and he turned to the nearest pair of cops with a friendly smile on his face.

"It’s cool, officers," he said. "No-one’s here to give you any trouble."

Speak for yourself, Angel thought. Having recognised the voice of Bo Peterson, crooked cop, he was perfectly happy to make some trouble if he had to. A quick glance revealed that the other cops were Luis Castaneda, standing near Bo, and Doug Manley and Richard Fischer at the other end of the alley. Peterson’s comrades in corruption. If Angel had been alone, he’d already have been on them, or past them and on his way home. But Buffy couldn’t survive a hail of bullets – she was Slayer-tough, but not immortal. So he tried a different tactic.

"On the ground, now!" one of the cops called, "Bellies down, arms out!"

"Just do what they say," Riley instructed. His Initiative experience had, Angel supposed, given him an affinity for law enforcement. It was not something Angel shared. Not only did he not want to take a chance that any of them would end up in jail, he didn’t trust Peterson for a second. The guy and his buddies had killed one person that Angel knew about, framing an innocent man for their crime – and Peterson was aware that Angel knew it, which made him dangerous. Chances were good that if their were put into a police car now, their only destination would be someplace quiet where they could get bullets pumped into their heads. Which again, not that big a deal for me, but bad news for Buffy and Riley.

~~~

Extract Three: Chapter Nine, pages 176-7.

Buffy held the young man’s face tenderly in her hands, feeling the roughness of his afternoon stubble, the slightly rubbery quality of his cheeks. She couldn’t help imagine how things had become so intense so quickly, and found herself wishing for a moment that there was a way to turn back the clock, to restore things to the way they had been. But she knew there wasn’t.

She put the face back down on the street where she had found it, and silently vowed to destroy whatever creature had torn it from some unsuspecting victim. Sunnydale crawled with vermin, supernatural beings that seemed to be here only to kill. Buffy was fed up with them.

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