Chapter 75: Making Waves
The Restaurant
After Caroline's declaration about building a proper care facility for elderly patients, the dinner conversation caught fire. Everyone had something to say about big dreams, New York, what was possible and what wasn't.
Adam sat back slightly and watched it unfold.
He respected what Caroline had said. Her father's death had clearly reorganized her priorities in a real and lasting way, and the direction she'd pointed herself in was genuinely good. But he'd been alive long enough, in two lives, to understand the difference between what people said at dinner tables and what they eventually did. He wasn't cynical about it. He just knew the distance between intention and action was where most things got sorted out.
He smiled when he was supposed to, contributed when it was natural, and let the conversation carry itself.
Joey, predictably, connected the American dream discussion back to acting.
Phoebe connected it back to animals.
Ross connected it to the broader sweep of human history, briefly.
Monica just wanted everyone to agree that New York was the center of everything important, which was the most defensible position at the table.
The Following Weeks
The hundred thousand copy second printing rolled out nationwide.
Newspaper coverage followed — not the Times, not anything that would impress a literary critic, but the kind of mid-tier commentary that reached people who browsed bookstores without a specific title in mind. Joey started intercepting any newspaper that had a mention of Lord of the Hidden before using it to wrap his sandwiches, which Adam found both touching and slightly chaotic.
More meaningfully, Jack began forwarding inquiries from production companies.
Small ones, mostly. The pattern was familiar: a newer work with momentum, a small company willing to option it cheaply, the genuine hope that it would become a hit, at which point they'd sell the option to a larger player and take the margin.
Adam turned down every one of them.
He'd seen this play out badly in too many directions. A sincere small company with limited resources attempting an ambitious adaptation and failing was one outcome. A sincere small company succeeding but losing creative control in the process was another. Neither served the material.
He waited.
Dark Horse Comics made contact in the early spring.
This was different.
DC and Marvel operated in their own perpetual superhero universes, continuously extending and rebooting their own characters. Dark Horse had built its identity on adapting existing works — Alien, Predator, Hellboy — leveraging established audiences with high-quality comics that respected the source material.
Lord of the Hidden was exactly the kind of world Dark Horse understood how to work with.
After several weeks of negotiation, with Random House at the table to provide institutional weight, a deal came together. Dark Horse would adapt the first volume into a comic series, with a thirty percent royalty on sales going to Adam, after Random House's negotiated share.
The math was straightforward and the numbers were significant. A complete first volume adaptation, split across multiple issues, total retail price exceeding a hundred dollars for the full set. If sales averaged fifty thousand copies — a conservative estimate given the novel's growing readership — the numbers climbed well into seven figures when you accounted for the full royalty structure.
And comics were just the beginning. The real value in a world like Lord of the Hidden was in what came after — the adaptation rights Adam had retained, the gaming potential, the merchandise. The fantasy universes that had built themselves into genuine cultural phenomena had done it through exactly this kind of layered approach.
Dark Horse moved quickly once the deal was signed. Their production team began the adaptation work, and the first issue launched timed with the novel's ongoing momentum.
At four dollars per issue, it found readers who hadn't opened the novel.
The world was growing on its own.
New Jersey — Bergen County
Leonard was walking home from school in considerably better spirits than he'd been walking home twelve months ago.
Word had gotten around after Adam's visit — that Leonard had a friend from out of state, apparently the kind of person who didn't particularly mind fighting Jimmy Beckman and could sustain that fight for an uncomfortable amount of time. Jimmy had recalibrated. The football team had followed Jimmy's lead, as they generally did.
Leonard's daily life had improved by a measurable amount.
His situation with Becky — the girl he'd been helping with her homework for two years in the complicated hope that she'd eventually notice him — had also shifted. She still worked through White Russians at a pace that concerned him, and she still needed a fair amount of support getting home afterward, but she'd started asking him questions about his life that weren't directly related to the next assignment.
Specifically, she'd asked about Adam.
Leonard had handled this by drawing freely from his comic book collection and inventing a biography that blended several heroes into one implausible but compelling person.
Becky, who was rarely fully sober when these conversations happened, found all of it completely believable.
Leonard felt complicated about this but was unable to stop doing it.
He was passing the comic book store on the corner when the window display caught his attention.
A new series. Art style he didn't recognize — less superhero, more atmospheric, the kind of linework that suggested a different sensibility entirely. He pushed the door open.
He picked up the first issue and flipped to the credits page.
He looked at the author's name.
He looked at it again.
Adam Duncan.
Leonard stood in the comic book store for a long moment, holding the issue, thinking about a guy who had shown up at his school, gotten into a fight with Jimmy Beckman on his behalf, and apparently also written a fantasy novel series that was now being adapted into comics.
He bought all the available issues and walked home faster than usual.
End of Chapter 75
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