The Nightmare Man: A Novel

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of Crooked Treen. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book´s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life. Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks, and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman´s latest novel. When another family is killed in a similar manner, Mills, along with his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, is determined to find the link to the book - and the killer - before the story reaches its chilling climax. As the series of ´Scarecrow crimes´ continues to mirror the book, Ben quickly becomes the prime suspect. He can´t remember much from the night he finished writing the novel, but he knows he wrote it in The Atrium, his grandfather´s forbidden room full of numbered books. Thousands of books. Books without words. As Ben digs deep into Blackwood´s history he learns he may have triggered a release of something trapped long ago - and it won´t stop with the horrors buried within the pages of his book.