Chapter Sixteen:  The Trailer Drops

The first teaser trailer releases online, sparking outrage from early book fans for its cheap quality.

The first teaser trailer for Purradise premiered online on a Tuesday morning, attached to a marketing push the studio had been building toward for weeks. There was a countdown clock on all the film's social media accounts, a cryptic single image released three days earlier of a sword half-buried in ash, a partnership with a streaming platform that had paid, according to an industry insider newsletter that Desmond had forwarded him with visible excitement, "an eight-figure sum" for exclusive digital rights down the line.

Localad watched the trailer for the first time at six in the morning, alone in his corporate apartment, because Desmond had sent him a private link an hour before the public release "so you can see it first, the way it should be."

It began with darkness.

A voice whispered, “Every wound demands vengeance.”

Localad paused the video.

The Wound had never demanded anything in its life. It was a wound. Its principal activity was remaining open. End of.

He continued.

Drums thundered. Brick Holland strode across a battlefield wearing armour that appeared to have annexed his neck. The single surviving knight said, “You cannot defeat grief.”

Brick replied, “Watch me.”

There then followed six massive explosions, two flying creatures, a kiss with a character Localad did not recognize at all, and a shot of the sword entering the Wound while the title PURRADISE emerged in letters made of fire.

Somewhere down the line, someone had also added a cat noise. Not a cat as such, a noise signifying a cat to a person who had once heard one being described.

The teaser then ended with Brick looking directly into camera.

“This time,” he said, “the sky bleeds back.”

It was ninety seconds long. It opened on Brick Holland's face, lit from below, delivering a growled version of a line that bore almost no resemblance to anything in the book. "They took everything from me. Now I will take it back" spoken over a montage of explosions, shadow-creatures, and a brief, blink-and-you'd-miss-it shot of the Wound itself, rendered as a churning vortex of fire rather than the still, silent tear in the sky Localad had described four hundred times across forty-odd drafts of the manuscript. The trailer then ended on the shouted line from the soundstage. "I don't need you to forgive me anymore!" synced to a bass drop, followed by the title card and a release date that felt, to Localad, both impossibly close and impossibly far away.

Localad closed down his laptop. But he quickly reopened it again.

The apartment became very quiet except for the refrigerator, which chose exactly that moment to issue one of its bureaucratic groans.

Online, the studio had already announced record engagement.

Trent sent an email congratulating the team on “strong cross-demographic heat.”

Bree circulated a chart demonstrating that the sword shot had performed particularly well among males aged eighteen to thirty-four who intended to purchase beverages during opening weekend.

And then the comments began.

He read through the comments before he could stop himself, which he would recognize, later, as a mistake he should have anticipated.

The internet's early reaction was split, roughly, into two camps: people excited for another big loud action movie who had never read the book and had no reason to compare it to anything, and second, a very much smaller, yet a lot more vocal group who had somehow, over the preceding months, found and read the small handful of early excerpts Localad had once posted, a while back, on an obscure fantasy-writing forum under his own name, back when he still fully believed no one but strangers on the internet would ever see the book at all.

This looks nothing like the book, one comment read, with several hundred replies underneath it, most of them agreeing.

Jasmine was a WOMAN. this is such a bait and switch. the ending in the actual book was about grief, not revenge, why does this look like every other generic fantasy trailer I’ve seen the last five years.

One comment even read: The book sounds better than the movie.

It received twelve likes.

Localad stared at it longer than the other larger arguments.

He closed the laptop again before he read any further, and sat for a long time in the silence of the apartment, listening to the refrigerator make its nightly noises, thinking about the town two thousand miles away where none of this. The trailer, the comments, the eight-figure streaming deal, would have made any sense at all if he'd tried to explain it a year earlier, standing behind the counter of a bookstore with a cracked bell, printing a single copy of a story that had, until a stranger's car broke down outside his window, belonged entirely to him.

Marjory texted him that morning, before he'd worked up the nerve to call her: Saw the trailer. how are you?

He looked at the message for a long time before answering.

He typed Fine.

Deleted it.

Typed Complicated.

Deleted that too.

Not great, he wrote back, finally, which was the truest thing he had said out loud, even if in writing, for months.

Do you want to talk about it?

Not yet, he wrote. Soon.

He put the phone down and looked out at the city, and for the first time since arriving, he found himself thinking not about how to fix what was happening to the movie, but about the shop back home. For months he had worried about the film. But now, for the first time, he actually thought about going home. Back to the cracked bell, the missing apostrophe, the counter where he'd once finished a book that had, for twenty years, asked nothing of him except honesty and a few coffee rings. He missed it all with an intensity that surprised him, sharp and sudden, like a hunger he hadn't noticed building until it arrived all at once. Homesickness had arrived, not as sadness but as a recognition of it.

Los Angeles had made everything larger than life except for him.

Outside, the city shone at full volume.

Inside, Localad opened the original manuscript on his computer.

The first sentence appeared. No notes. No tracked changes. No market positioning.

Just Purradise.

He read until dawn.

He did not know yet that the trailer's reception — messy, divided, already generating the kind of pre-release controversy that would follow the film all the way to its premiere — was the first small tremor of something much larger to come.

He only knew that watching those ninety seconds of his own story, thoroughly filtered through a year of meeting rooms he hadn't chosen and choices he hadn't fully made, had left him feeling less like a successful writer and more like a man watching a photograph of his childhood home be slowly, professionally, competently demolished, one confident decision at a time.

And here ends part two of my latest book. There's still two more parts to come so stay tuned for the next instalments. And thank you for reading thus far.