Tammi D. Ruselowski

Ex-crime reporter Leonard Blaylock spends his days on an unusual hobby, developing strangers’ forgotten and discarded rolls of film. He loves the small mysteries the photographs reveal to him. Then Leonard finds something no one would ever expect, or want, to see captured on film—the murder of a young woman. But that’s impossible, because the woman is already dead. Leonard was there when it happened five years earlier.

On what is supposed to be a night of joyous reunion for Lance Brody, instead he witnesses a terrible crime. A human life taken. The murderer does not flee the scene. Does not attempt to fight back. Instead he only offers Lance these words: “The devil in the woods made me do it.” Knowing that the universe has guided him to another town that needs his help, Lance Brody and his group of new companions begin to dig deeper into the evil that has plagued the town’s woods for centuries.

A freak blizzard. A roadside motel. A past that refuses to die. When the snowstorm arrives - the one that no weatherman had forecast - Lance Brody is walking along a desolate road in the middle of nowhere. On the brink of freezing, he finally stumbles across the small roadside motel. Thus starts the longest night of Lance Brody’s life. One full of gruesome deaths, spirits with cryptic messages, whirlwind visions from the past, and the terror-inducing realization that the motel is refusing to let Lance leave until he’s finished what it wants him to.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries.