Stephen King fans have been taking part in a game of literary hide and seek, concealing snippets of text from his new novel Under the Dome in random locations around the UK and cyberspace.
One reader dangled a snippet from Hungerford bridge; another scribbled their extract on a wall in central London's Bourne housing estate. Others took an electronic route, hiding text in website code or blogs. One put two snippets up for sale in a fake auction. The game was devised by the novel's UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton, which broke the 900-page Under the Dome into 5,000 small pieces, seeding them across fansites itself and also inviting fans to collect their own snippets and hide them in the most creative way possible.
More than 5,000 people took part. "The fans are so desperate to read the book that they have been trying to collect all the pieces," said Laurence Festal, head of consumer marketing at Hodder.
Under the Dome, out today, runs to 336,114 words, featuring more than 100 characters, telling the story of a Maine town cut off from the world by an invisible barrier. "I tried this once before when I was a lot younger, but the project was just too big for me. But it was a terrific idea and it never entirely left my mind," said King. "Every now and then it would say write me, and eventually I did. I sure hope people like it."
Mark Nelson, a 42-year-old amateur photographer from Chester, won the Hodder competition after hiding his extract in a Flickr photograph of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, and providing a clue on his Twitter stream. Nelson said he had been a huge King fan in his teens and early 20s, when he "consumed everything Stephen King wrote". He thought his 2001 novel Dreamcatcher was "terrible", but that last year's Duma Key was "excellent, and a real return to form".
"I've got high hopes for Under the Dome," he said. "It's being compared to The Stand, which was his masterpiece. People get a bit snotty about genre fiction, but King is almost Dickensian in his character development and plots."
The end of the campaign saw 25 King fans positioned along the skyline on the north bank of the Thames, "under the dome" of St Paul's, holding giant placards with segments of the final lines from the book.
"You couldn't really work out what happens from it – it's another teaser," said Festal.