The Taking of Happy Jack Road

Bestselling crime novelist Paul Ellis is running on empty. Haunted by a rainy-night accident on a desolate Maine road and the ghost of a boy who vanished without a trace, his writing—and his life—has ground to a halt.

But the boy’s mother arrives at his cabin with a horrifying truth: the thing on Happy Jack Road doesn’t want his life. It wants his story—the guilt, the fear, the secret chapters of his past. It feeds on tragedy, and it’s hungry for his final act.

To save the missing boy and himself, Paul must do the one thing he thought was impossible: write his way out. But as he pens his own dark confession, he draws the attention of far more than the local monster. An Editor from a hidden world of narrative control arrives to demand a proper, tragic ending—or erase Paul’s story from existence entirely.

Now, a failed writer, a grieving mother, and a handful of unlikely allies must fight not with weapons, but with words. They must rewrite the rules, plant seeds of chaos, and become “loose ends” in a universe that demands neat, sorrowful conclusions.

The Taking of Happy Jack Road is a chilling meta-thriller about the stories we tell, the monsters we create, and the quiet, stubborn power of those who refuse to follow the plot.