Johnson is an extraordinary character and a rare creature in literature because he's extraordinarily three-dimensional. On making Samuel Johnson, who died in 1784, a character in his modern-day story And I suppose one of the things I wanted to do in the book was celebrate the act of reading, which is such a mysterious and not sufficiently remarked upon transaction between two consciousnesses, only one of which needs to be alive. (Sarah Lee/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux)Р”Р„nd I think that everyone who loves books has experienced the feeling of being taken over by another mind. Marcel Theroux's other novels include The Confessions Of Mycroft Holmes and A Stranger In The Earth.

In other words, that books are alive and that they've got the quintessence of the author inside them. On body swapping as a metaphor for readingР”В«y setting myself the task of reincarnating someone, I was inspired by John Milton, who has a line in an essay he wrote where he says that books are not absolutely dead things but do contain the essence of the living intellect that bred them. I guess I knew then it wasn't going to be a naturalistic story. I just started with the premise that I wanted someone to come back from the dead and I started thinking about how on Earth that might be possible. And I know there's a certain embarrassment about talking about science fiction in polite company, so some people prefer to call it 'speculative fiction' instead.

On the many genres at play in his novel - science fiction, literary fiction, detective fiction, horror fiction He joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about his genre-bending new novel and the thin lines that separate real life and science fiction. Theroux, whose previous novel, Far North, was a National Book Award finalist, is also a filmmaker.

As Slopen is cautioned, 'the truth of this situation is much stranger and more complex than you can imagine.' Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies is about Nicholas Slopen's return to life, the 18th-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson and dead people inhabiting new bodies.

Body swap fiction