The Novel

Will Streeton always wanted to be a writer. Instead, he's a bored public servant with a crumbling relationship and a head full of unwritten stories. When he finally quits his job to chase inspiration, his life begins to unravel.

Drunken nights turn to empty days, and the boundary between imagination and experience starts to blur as Will begins writing Pursuing the Darkness-a horror/crime novel about Paul, a broken musician, and his uncle Fred, a disgruntled policeman. But as Will writes, strange coincidences occur. The people he meets begin to resemble the victims in his story. His characters' voices start whispering back.

Is Will losing his mind-or is he on his way to becoming the killer he's created?

Nick Lachmund's The Novel is a biting, blackly comic portrait of the failed artist, the fragile male ego, and the dangerous beauty of storytelling itself. Unflinching, sharp, and darkly compelling, it asks: when does writing stop being fiction?