Chapter Twenty-Three:  An Underground Campaign

The delivery driver looked into Harbour & Page’s back room.

"Mmm," he thought to himself. “Where do you want them?”

Localad looked at the surrounding shelves, the desk, the staircase and the narrow passage currently occupied by a papier-mâché whale left over from the summer’s reading programme.

“In a larger shop I think.”

They stacked the boxes from floor to ceiling in the shop's store room.

The books arrived in early winter, three thousand copies. All stacked in boxes that filled the back room of Harbour Page Booksellers nearly to the ceiling, and Localad spent two full days simply unpacking them, stacking them on every available shelf and surface the shop had on offer, feeling, with each box he opened, a satisfaction that had absolutely nothing in common with the satisfaction he'd felt eighteen months earlier watching a six-figure check drop and later clear at the bank.

He put the first copies on the shop's own shelves, of course, in the New Releases section beside the front window, right where a passing tourist or even a long time local might see them. Purradise appeared in neat and tidy rows: matte black covers, plain serif title, Localad’s name. No Brick Holland. No fire vortex. No promise that destiny had poor aim.

The first copy went on the shelf behind the counter beside his father’s photograph. The second Marjory bought, despite Localad’s insistence that she could have one.

“I am supporting a local business,” she said.

“You own a part share of the business.”

“Then I fully understand the ritual.”

Mrs. Alvarez purchased the third and began reading during her lunch break at the diner. She finished four days later and entered Harbour & Page carrying the book bristling with paper markers.

“They removed everything,” she announced.

“Not everything.”

“They removed the good everything.”

Mr. Okafor bought a copy for his granddaughter and one for himself.

“I thought fantasy wasn’t your sort of thing,” Localad said.

Mr. Okafor considered this. “Yes, quite right, but grief is.”

Within two weeks, the whole of Meridian Cove had read the book. Even the retired schoolteacher who favoured large-print mysteries bought one for herself despite the book being printed in a font she complained, cheerfully, was "smaller than I'd like, but I'll manage."

This was not literally the truth, but small towns operate through a system of representative certainty. Mrs. Alvarez had read it, which meant the whole diner had read it. The harbour-master’s wife had read it, which meant the whole docks had read it. The retired teacher had read it, which meant the education authority had issued a ruling.

Word had begun to move through Meridian Cove the way word moves through any small town — slowly at first, then all at once, carried from the diner counter to the dock to the checkout line at the grocery, until it seemed that everyone in town either had a copy or knew someone who did, and everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about how it compared to the film they'd all watched together at the multiplex two hours inland.

"It's so much better," Mrs. Alvarez told Localad, unprompted, ringing up her own lunch order at the diner while Localad sat at the counter eating a sandwich. She was loud enough that three other tables turned round to look. "I mean that as a genuine compliment to you, and also as an insult to whoever made that movie. Jasmine is a woman. Did you know that? In the actual book, she's a woman."

"Actually, I did know that," Localad said, hiding a smile while the rest of her captive audience took note. “I wrote her.”

"Well, they should know it too."

It was Marjory who suggested, over dinner one night in late winter, that the local reaction was a story worth telling beyond Meridian Cove, and it was Marjory, too, who suggested the specific shape the telling should take. 

Not a press release, not an interview with a reporter, nothing that could conceivably be read as Localad disparaging the film himself, but something smaller and a lot more organic: a single photograph, taken on her own phone, an image of the shop's front window, with three thousand books stacked in a small, defiant pyramid beneath a hand-lettered sign that read, in Localad's own handwriting, the same seven words he'd put on the back cover.

This is the book. Not the movie.

She posted it to her own social media account, which had perhaps four hundred plus followers, mostly other small business owners and people from town, with a short caption explaining, simply, that the local bookstore's owner had written the novel that the recent blockbuster movie was based on, and had just self-published the original, unaltered manuscript, available now, only at Harbour Page Booksellers. There would be no further commentary, no criticism of the film attached.

Our local bookseller spent twenty years writing the novel behind the recent film. This is his original, unaltered story, now available from Harbour & Page in Meridian Cove.

Priya reviewed the wording prior to posting. “It is factual,” she said. “Almost aggressively so.”

The post was shared eleven times on the first day. Forty by the end of the week. And then, in the way that these things sometimes happen without any clear point of ignition (hint, hint), someone with a much larger following, a book reviewer with an audience in the hundreds of thousands, who had, it turned out, been one of the early, vocal critics of the film's changes, found the post, then reposted it with a caption of her own:

THE ORIGINAL BOOK EXISTS. THE AUTHOR HAS ACTUALLY PUBLISHED IT HIMSELF. JASMINE IS STILL JASMINE.

By morning, Localad’s phone had become a distressed insect.

Orders arrived from three states, then eight, then places that Localad only knew about, primarily from shipping surcharge manifests.

Harbour & Page’s website, built as a high school project years earlier by Mr. Okafor’s granddaughter, collapsed under the new found surge in traffic and displayed nothing more than an error page featuring a cheerful illustration of an open book.

He called Marjory before he'd even had coffee.

"Did you see —"

"Yes, I saw," she said, and he could hear, over the phone, the particular breathless quality of someone who had also been up half the night constantly refreshing the same post. "Localad. I think this is actually happening. That book on your webby's error page is not only open,” Marjory observed. “The thing is unconscious.”

Localad spent the rest of the day hurriedly packing orders. He was good at packing orders. This was reassuring for him. Fame remained totally incomprehensible to him, but cardboard was real, it had hard edges.

Desmond sent Localad a text message:

Hey, I saw the post.

Localad waited. And a second followed.

The cover is right. No argument here.

Localad did not answer immediately. 

Then he wrote: Hey, do you still have the first copy?

Three dots appeared, vanished, then returned.

I know, I know, I’m on it.

The next morning, a courier delivered a package from Los Angeles. Inside was the original bound copy, the one Desmond had taken from the counter eighteen months beforehand. Its cover was slightly worn. Several pages bore faint coffee marks. A receipt still marked chapter three.

There was no note to accompany it.

Localad placed it beside the new copies. The book’s first ever reader and borrower, had finally returned the book.

And all while outside, more and more people began queuing.

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