Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6960
February 2010 10 February 2010 10 And that's just when the nightmare begins. First, Alan's wife disappears without a trace; then, his life begins to imitate his art. Every time he awakes, he fi nds the pages of his manuscript have disappeared, grown, or changed—endlessly ridden with edits he can't remember making. Even worse, the scenes on the page have a habit of coming true, with him as the protagonist and his wife cast in the role of a character named Alice. As he fi nds and analyzes the lost pages, he begins to suspect she has been kidnapped and his manuscript is the ransom the kidnappers want. Alan struggles to fi nd her, but to do so, he must fi rst fi nd the missing pages. As he locates each page, he reads the scenes back to himself … just as they suddenly, mysteri- ously, begin to come true. Alan goes to a remote cabin to rendezvous with a local sheriff named Rusty, who says he has found some of the missing pages. Heading down the path to the cabin, Alan fi nds a page of his manuscript in the back of a jeep. He reads the page in voice-over: "He screamed, ' ey're here!' and then he pulled the trigger." Just then, the lights along the path blow out, and a scream emanates from the cabin. ere, Alan fi nds a trail of blood leading to Rusty's bullet- ridden body, crumpled against the wall. is is the kind of fusion between fi ction and reality that confronts Alan at every turn. He's chased by police heli- copters through the forest, nearly bulldozed through a gas station by a front-end loader, and confronted by residents who are strangely aware of his writing, even spouting his di- alog—word for word—until he is afraid to go to sleep, lest the story take another turn for the worse. It does. Switching genres from thriller to horror, wherein creatures called "dark forces" possess the locals. ey begin to stalk him during the night and can only be repelled by light. He wonders, Are they the kidnappers? As the writer desperately scours the pages for what hap- pens next—to direct the plot before it spirals out of his con- trol—Alan's story, his life, and his wife's fate intertwine until he is lost in a psychological maze, a twilight state between dream, fi ction, and reality, as complex and riveting as any- thing you'd fi nd in Lost or Twin Peaks. Did he write the pag- es? Is his wife kidnapped or dead? Is he mad? As he wrestles with these questions, Alan's neurotic and shifty-eyed literary agent, Barry Wheeler, questions his sanity. Best-selling novelist Alan Wake has lost his gift. The creative well has run dry, and he's had nary an idea in more than two years. Desperate to stoke her hus- band's waning imagination, Alan's wife brings him to Bright Falls, Washington, an idyllic small town nes- tled in the rugged landscape of the Paci c Northwest. Here, the coniferous forests are shrouded in a thick, ghostly mist, and icy cool lakes shimmer in the low winter light. The eerie world of Bright Falls recalls that of David Lynch's Twin Peaks or any of Stephen King's creepy Maine settings. Steeped in this small- town atmosphere—at once overly friendly, prosaic, and menacing—Alan's imagination begins to ow again, pouring out a manuscript for a thriller, seem- ingly in his sleep. The creative drought is over. ■ ■ ■ ■ Gaming