DAYTON, OH — Neighbors and loved ones confirmed Tuesday that local man Derek Fossoway, 34, has now spent forty-five consecutive minutes pausing a Netflix limited series to explain how dramatically it differs from the book upon which it is based, despite having never, at any point in his life, opened the book.

Fossoway, who reportedly encountered a three-paragraph Wikipedia summary of the novel sometime during a commercial break for a college football bowl game in January 2019, has described the adaptation as "a total butchering," "basically fan fiction," and, at one point, "an insult to everyone who actually read it."

"The whole third act is just gone," Fossoway told the room, gesturing at a paused frame of the television. "In the book, that entire subplot plays out over like two hundred pages. They just — they cut it. They cut all of it."

The subplot in question, according to the Wikipedia article Fossoway no longer remembers reading, was mentioned in a single sentence under the heading "Plot."

"He said the author 'must be rolling in his grave,' which is notable given that the author is alive, was an executive producer on the show, and has called it his preferred version of the story."

Dr. Pamela Vreech, Senior Fellow in Audience Self-Mythology at the Dayton Institute for Recreational Certainty, said the behavior is consistent with what researchers call "Wikipedia Confidence Transfer," a phenomenon in which partial exposure to secondary source material produces subjective expertise indistinguishable, to its host, from actual knowledge.

"The subject genuinely believes he has read the book," Dr. Vreech explained. "From a neurological standpoint, skimming a plot summary while eating nachos activates many of the same self-satisfaction pathways as reading four hundred and twelve pages of literary fiction. The brain doesn't especially care which one happened."

Fossoway's partner, who has seen the show before and was, in fact, enjoying it, described the experience as "educational in a specific way I don't have a word for yet."

Fossoway has since elaborated on the novel's themes, its place in the author's broader oeuvre, the author's "whole thing" with unreliable narrators, and what the book was "really about underneath," pausing the episode four additional times to do so. He has not, at any point, indicated uncertainty.

The episode remains at the forty-two-minute mark.

When asked whether he might simply finish watching, Fossoway said he would, but that viewers really owed it to themselves to read the source material first.

"It just hits different when you know what they took out," he said.

The book is available at the Dayton Public Library. Records show Fossoway has not visited the library since 2011, when he returned a DVD.