Five After Midnight

More Tales From The Dark

The rain played tricks. The road was hungry. And the story was just beginning.

Paul Ellis, a blocked crime novelist fleeing his failures, thinks the worst thing on Happy Jack Road was the accident—the sickening thump in the storm, the small handprint on his hood, the smell of rotting pears. The sheriff calls it stress. Paul knows it was a boy.

Now, the boy’s mother is at his door. Her son vanished months ago. She says the thing that took him isn’t finished. It doesn’t just haunt the lonely stretch of asphalt—it feeds on stories. On guilt. On fear. And it’s started writing Paul’s.

Trapped in a nightmare curated by an entity that collects human tragedy, Paul’s only weapon is his abandoned typewriter. To save what’s left of his sanity and a child he may have killed, he must do the one thing he can’t: write an ending so unexpected, it defies the darkness itself.

But in the deep woods of Maine, some stories have roots. And the editor of sorrows is always watching.