Ethan, twenty -four and broke , works at The Vellum , the city's oldest library . His life is mundane but his nights are not, for he bears a secret . The books in the Vellum are doors, and Ethan is gifted the power to walk through them by the Vellum itself.

Diving inside a book had been his life for the last four years -rewriting stories and changing endings and saving characters from death the books owed -out of kindness he felt while reading the book in the real world .

But kindness it was not.

For every character Ethan saved , a world paid for it in the dark . And now the bill has come to collect .

The characters he saved are turning up dead in his own city -real bodies , by impossible means, in rooms that were locked and empty , each one unmade with patient and surgical cruelty by someone who knows every book he ever dived into.

Who is killing the characters he saved ? Why does his city , four hundred miles from the sea, smell of salt and rope and tide ?

And what is bleeding through the cracks now that the wall between the page and the world has begun to crumble- as realities bend , as worlds converge , as new and hungry stories are born in the seam where they fold together ?

Follow Ethan to the bottom of the Vellum , through every door, and every grave his kindness made- to the last truth no reader was ever meant to reach .

He believed he was the savior when in reality he was only ever the destroyer.

This is the unwriting of Ethan .