That cryptic J.J. Abrams trailer is probably for a book written by somebody else
Yesterday, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot released a trailer entitled “Stranger,” specifically designed to incite wild speculation about what exactly it portends. As expected, predictions ran rampant, from Lost spinoffs, to a video game project related to Bad Robot's partnership with Valve, to the last Rod Serling script Bad Robot acquired. But there's another project out there that currently seems the most plausible.
Bleeding Cool started piecing together information about various Bad Robot projects and stumbled across S., a novel due in October from Mulholland Books. It’s a story "conceived of and developed by"Abrams, but actually written by author Doug Dorst, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. The first promo material for the book appears to be a postcard from Brazil, which you can see at The Huffington Post, that features copy written in the same font that appears in the “Stranger” trailer.
Little, Brown editor Joshua Kendall previously stated that S. will contain “20 to 22 pieces of ephemera in the ‘real world’,” but as with many Abrams projects, don’t expect all of the far-flung pieces to form a logical patchwork that answers all questions. You can preorder S. at Amazon, and read the full description of the book below.
J.J. Abrams has created, written, produced, and directed groundbreaking television shows such as the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning Lost and Alias and blockbuster films such as Star Trek,Cloverfield, Super 8, Mission: Impossible and Armageddon. His work is renowned for its sense of wonder and invention, and for helping reshape what's possible in film and television today.
In his first-ever idea for a novel, Abrams conceived of and developed a multi-layered literary puzzle of love and adventure. At its core, we have a book of mysterious provenance. In the margins, another tale unfolds: hand-scribbled notes, questions, and confrontations between two readers. Between the pages, online, and in the real world, you'll find evidence of their interaction, ephemera that brings this tale vividly to life.
Abrams turned to PEN/Hemingway Award- and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelist Doug Dorst, author of the acclaimed novel Alive in Necropolis (Riverhead, 2008) and story collection The Surf Guru(Riverhead, 2010), to write S. Together, Abrams' vision and Dorst's expert craftsmanship will redefine the novel.