Your life is more than words on a page. The idea is absurd, maddening, and yet… your mind refuses to release its grasp on it.

You don't know what brought you to buy that novel in the first place, the horror pulp with the trashy cover. The passing impulse turned into an obsession, every spare waking moment spent pouring through the paperback's pages. The book itself was nothing impressive, tortured amateurish prose cheaply printed, but from the very first paragraph, a cold opening where some unfortunate kid dies to the monster lurking in the hills, the details seemed oddly familiar. The description of fog snaking through the looming, towering pines made you pause and glance out the nearby window to see what could have been the very same woods, uncanny in its resemblance. As you read, more and more striking similarities emerged between the fiction and your very own hometown. The names were different, for the most part, but you could clearly see what the characters and places in the novel had been based on, the people and places you had grown up around your entire life, interwoven with the author's narrative of grisly deaths and supernatural horrors.

Paying attention to who wrote the thing offered no comfort. A small town only ever has so many things to talk about, and you vaguely recalled when a few years back the topic had been the author, Lionel Weaver, moving to here of all places from the big city. He had settled into the house on the lake that had sat vacant for years every since old man Henderson did what he did with that axe. You had even unknowingly brushed shoulders with him from time to time, with his tweed jacket and thick glasses. The simple explanation you tried to console yourself with was that Weaver was obviously writing about his surroundings, applying his imagination, exaggerating details, embellishing and inventing the dramatic mysteries, supernatural horrors skulking in the shadows. But that wasn't satisfactory.

As the books went on, the resemblance to the actual people and places of the town only grew stronger, even as the plots became more outlandish and terrifying. There couldn't possibly be an ancient conspiratorial cult running the local government, or a horror from beyond time dwelling in the storm drains, could there? Tearing voraciously through the sequels, Weaver was an extremely prolific author, you pieced together more and more details that more than just reminded you of yourself, they had come directly from your life, intimate things you had never told a soul about were printed here, set down in the ink of a bestseller you had plucked from the shelf of the local bookstore.

You knew what happened to people in these kinds of stories, you had read what Weaver did to his characters, especially ones who got close to the truth of what was happening and it wasn't pretty.