Joe finds a biography of himself, one he has never written.
Henry Count is murderously angry.
Someone is trying to scare them both
Joe Shaw is a loser. The product of a loveless, broken home and a meat fixation, Shaw reaches a sort of maturity low on friends and experience, but high on imagination. His bleak future opens into a universe of possibilities when he discovers an abandoned biography of him, a story which is only partially written. As he begins to read, he finds that everything written in the book, IS him
As the frightened weeks pass, he adds more paragraphs, when the story suddenly stops without reason, 11 of the 26 chapters written, leaving page after page of emptiness. Joe drunkenly fills in the remaining chapters and the following day, what he has been written actually transpires, only with subtle changes. Joe writes the following chapter and again what he writes happens. He now has 14 empty chapters to fill, yet despite the empty pages, all subsequent chapters have headings waiting to be written. By him.
But who is Henry Count? And why is his 19th century life affecting Joe's present?
Joe decides to finish the book and in doing so, forge a blueprint for the perfect life. But the book has other ideas...