Let's get the tl;dr version out of the way first: If you were a fan of Lost – and especially the speculation and theorizing that surrounded the show itself – then S., the novel/meta-narrative by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, is pretty much written for you. At times, it feels as if reading the book is like having the entirety of Lost (the television series and the fandom alike) downloaded into your head simultaneously.

As much S. is, as the slipcover helpfully describes, a "love letter to the written word" (which it is, but we'll get to that later), it's also very much a love letter to Abrams' career to date. There are oblique references to almost all of Abrams' past projects throughout the book: the romance tales of Felicity; the constantly-revised concepts of identity in Alias; the supernatural existentialism of Lost; the genre pastiche of Super 8; the found object storytelling of Cloverfield. All we needed was an appearance from the Starship Enterprise as commanded by Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible movies and we'd practically have a full set.

Despite that, though, S. – a fictional artifact, much like the found film of *Cloverfield *– hangs together surprisingly well. That's an odd thing to say about something that has at least four different interconnected narratives unfolding at the same time, although not necessarily in chronological order, a la Lost's signature flashback-flashforward storytelling. Perhaps you remember the original video tease for S., which appeared online this summer without any explanation:

The video connects to and contains Ship of Theseus, a novel written by a mysterious political dissident known as "V.M. Straka." Little is known about Straka, even by "F.X. Caldeira," the translator of his works and publisher of this final novel, published after Straka's disappearance and assumed death. Ship is one of the texts of S., with Caldeira's footnotes for the novel offering a second text that seemingly gives context into Straka's life and identity.

And then there is a *third *layer: The copy of Ship that exists in S. has been heavily annotated by a scholar researching Straka's identity who doesn't quite agree with Caldeira's footnotes. His notes soon become a conversation with Jen, a grad student with too much time on her hands, as well as a chip on her shoulder and numerous secrets in her past. That conversation becomes the fourth text, another thread to follow.

Needless to say, S. is a very dense read; Ship of Theseus alone is a 460-odd page book that could best be described as a Kafka pastiche in which the amnesiac lead undergoes a journey-cum-political metaphor for the industrial revolution and birth of the military industrial complex, complete with assassinations, ghost pirate ships and potential time travel mixed in for good measure. S. the book goes far beyond that, though, with ephemera like newspaper clippings, letters, postcards and photographs scattered throughout.

It isn't a difficult read, however. There's an obvious playfulness throughout the whole thing, whether it's the scholar making fun of Straka's prose (heading off potential complaints about the same from real reviewers, perhaps), Jen's snarky commentary about the scholar's own pretensions, or simply the chance to fall down the rabbit hole of trying to make sense of the various mysteries before all is revealed. Midway through the book, I'd pretty much figured out the confused continuity of the margin comments – Jen and the scholar move through the book multiple times, so their comments aren't "in order," as such; you can tell roughly where they are in their relationship by the colors of ink being used. When I started to notice patterns in the footnotes that I'd previously thought were printing errors, it occurred to me that I should probably close the book and do something less obsessive for a while.

I didn't want to, though. Reading S., and trying to decode everything – both for my own entertainment and education – was an incredibly enjoyable, fun experience, as well as a particularly immersive one. Ship of Theseus starts offering commentary about "voices in the margins" towards the end, as if reminding readers to pay attention to what Jen and the scholar are writing, just as their experiences seem to be blurring the line between the fiction and their reality in a way that's particularly uncomfortable.

Much of that is thanks to the format; Ship of Theseus has the look and feel of an authentic period book, down to the fake library labels attached. The comments on the book are handwritten, not printed in a "script" font. That adds to the verisimilitude in a way that's difficult to describe, and the various additional pieces of information are similarly "real." The photographs feel like photographs, the postcards like postcards, the scrawled napkin like a real napkin, and so on. It's almost impossible to imagine S. even existing in a format outside of print, never mind being anywhere near as successful in it. (There are, nonetheless, e-book and audiobook versions of S.; I'm very curious to try them and see how they differ.)

For that alone, S. would be the "love letter to the written word" it promises, but the celebration of prose and publishing goes far beyond that. This is, after all, a book where one of the main characters is an absent novelist, and where a relationship begins because of a shared love of a book. For all its mysteries and intrigues, this is a book about the value of books, and what they can offer us that other storytelling mediums cannot.

Abrams' love of mystery (and the "mystery box") has been well-documented in the past. S., in many ways, is that mystery box, filled with secrets and stories that are endlessly beguiling and inviting. It's not a perfect book, of course, but it's an impressively smart, engaging one that doesn't just reward close reading but demands it, and applauds the obsessive impulse behind doing so the entire time.