“Death is not the worst than can happen to men.” (Plato)
Everyone loves a good mystery, so the saying goes.
And no one more than J. J. Abrams, a man who has never met a mysterious viral teaser campaign he didn’t like.
His latest tantalising effort, which surfaced in the latter part of August, and which I featured here, was a trailer simply titled Stranger, featuring a man who washes ashore, his lips sown tight, with no memory of who he is.
While I was uncharacteristically happy to let the mystery play out – I know who am I? I don’t recognise me anymore! – many other people put on their pop culture thinking caps and didn’t their darndest to work out what it could all mean.
Speculation ran feverishly rampant on the interweb with but my favourites were from Jeff Jensen at popwatch.ew.com who offered up that it was (a) a trailer for one of the two shows Abrams company Bad Robot has sold to NBC, Believe, (b) a tease for a Lost spinoff or even (c) a Star Wars teaser (Abrams is directing the next instalment in the now Disney-owned franchise).
… or possibly even (d) a new novel titled S by Doug Dorst written in collaboration with Abrams, due out October 29 this year.
Turns out that it was in fact (d)!
Congratulations Jeff Jensen and whoever else correctly connected all the dots, followed the breadcrumbs to their likely source and divined the soothsayer’s signs!
It sounds like an intriguing book with a description that possibly brings up more questions than it answers (which as I said in my first post is fine by me; in an information rich, everything gets dissected world, some mystery is welcome) …
One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.
A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.
The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.
The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.
The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.
S., conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand, and it is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to the written word. (source: amazon.com)
You can solve the mystery for yourself when S. releases October 29.