Cathy's Book

I don't see anything wrong with an interactive novel.
Personally, I loved Cathy's Book. I thought the pieces of evidence that came with the book only helped to enrich the experience of reading it- instead of imagining the pictures, the notes, the websites, and the voicemails, we were given them to look at for ourselves. We could draw our own conclusions, and then test them out by reading the book.
Even though there was some disappointment- I didn't imagine Victor looked the way he did in the photo we had to piece together- overall, the evidence helped make the story more real for me, and I found myself treating it as more of an experience, more interactive, than other fictional novels I've read, where everything is left to the imagination.

There is the controversy as to whether these "interactive" novels should even exist, because some say they ruin the experience of having to imagine all the events in a work of fiction- the main draw of reading a book in the first place. Combining the text with images, websites, voicemails, "real" pieces of evidence kind of reminds me of Mitchell's imagetext relationship; would Cathy's Book be considered an imagetext, image/text, or image-text relationship? I would say the second one, because the images are given with the text, all the evidence provided is given with the text, but it's not integral to it. One can read the story and enjoy the book without having the evidence close at hand. That would be what most would call the "true" narrative experience- a purely text work, with no image attached. Cathy's Book wouldn't be a metapicture, obviously, but perhaps it could be considered somewhat of a "meta-narrative". Only somewhat, though. By using real pictures, voices, and websites, (and I guess, theoretically, drawings in the diary itself), but not making it imperative for the reader to look at/listen to them throughout the story, it is somewhat self-referential without being so in the full sense of the term- just enough to enrich the experience a little bit for the reader, making the story and its effect on you just a little bit more enthralling.