J.J. Abrams is known for many things in film and television, but one of the biggies is his secretive nature. We still know virtually nothing about Star Wars: Episode VII, a tactic he's used when making other features like the most recent installments of Star Trek. Last month, he released a teaser trailer called "Stranger" that left many people scratching their heads (see above). But now, the mystery has been revealed, and it's not quite what we expected. Neither a film nor TV project, Abrams is working on a book!

A collaboration between Abrams and Doug Dorst (Alive in Necropolis), S. finds a college student and a grad student coming together due to notes written in the margins of V.M. Straka's Ship of Theseus. We could continue to parse meaning from the official description, but considering the enigmatic nature of the creators and the creations, it might make sense to just check out the synopsis yourself.



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.

S. debuts on Oct. 29.

(via Collider)