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There’s something delicious about being haunted by an idea. It doesn’t always come crashing in. Sometimes, it creeps. A whisper. A flicker. A stray line that crawls into your thoughts and refuses to leave. That’s how The Last Page started. Not with a bang—but with a murmur. A thought I couldn’t shake: What if a book didn’t just tell stories… what if it collected them? I’ve always lived in stories. Since I was a child, I read obsessively, slipping between worlds crafted by Tolkien, Rowling, Sapkowski, and George R.R. Martin. But there was always something about the darker tales—the ones with edges, with hidden rooms and unreliable narrators—that felt like home. Edgar Allan Poe, V.C. Andrews, Agatha Christie, Stephen King… those names lived on my shelves like old friends. Friends who whispered unsettling things in the quiet. When I started writing The Last Page, I didn’t intend to write a horror novel. I intended to survive. I was coming out of a year-long burnout—one that nearly took everything from me. Diagnosed with twice-exceptionality (ADHD and giftedness), I had burned the candle from both ends and lit the table on fire for good measure. Writing became therapy. A quiet exorcism. And then came Elias Marr. The moment I met him, hunched over a strange book he shouldn't have opened, I knew I wasn’t writing just a story—I was writing many. Each short tale within The Last Page unfolded like a memory he didn’t know he had. They were eerie, sometimes tragic, sometimes quietly violent—but always connected. There was the boy who vanished into a story that wouldn’t end. The photographer whose images began to scream. The mirror that erased the man standing before it. Each story fed the larger truth. Each page turned deeper into the unknown. And beneath it all was the Collector—the thing that watches when no one else can. The thing that waits for the next reader. Writing The Last Page taught me how layered horror could be. How it could echo with grief, and memory, and guilt. How every short tale could be a confession, and every correction a clue. It reminded me that what unsettles us most… often reflects us best. So if you’ve found your way here—welcome. This blog will be a space for unraveling truths, behind-the-scenes glimpses, story lore, and the strange little corners of my mind where characters like Elias, Maya, and Henry are still very much alive. Some stories don't end.&nbsp;Some stories keep writing themselves.&nbsp;And some… are still waiting to be read.

The Story behind the Stories

Ana W. Black

Ana W. Black |Of Shadows and truths

The Story behind the Stories