Beneath a Texas public library, there's a vault that shouldn't exist - where lost manuscripts breathe and famous ghosts hold meetings. When a sleepless writer stumbles on a black-oaked pedestal and a book that won't stay closed, language stops behaving. A Shakespeare prophecy no one was meant to read. Asimov's hidden Fourth Law humming under the floor. A kidnapping note on the evening news - written line-for-line from his notebook.Every sentence he drafts begins to happen.The city tilts. Sirens braid the air. A ruthless presence - the Producer - keeps writing on the sky: MAKE IT CLEANER. The dead form a Council and demand pages. The night clerk, Evelyn Bishop, teaches the only magic that works: guardrails, not spells. Return what you wrest back. Leave margins for the living. And never, ever give a story a clean end.But the voices aren't asking to haunt. They want bodies. They want continuity. And they want him.As books mutiny and shelves burn without ash, the writer must race a clock made of headlines to save a kidnapped heiress who refuses to be anyone's plot device, shut a breach that lets stories wear people like coats, and decide whether to burn the book that started it all - or become its ink. If he refuses, language riots. If he agrees, he disappears by degrees.Breathless, frightening, and darkly lyrical, Library of the Dead is a literary thriller about what happens when words won't stay on the page: a city held together by policy and human decency, a chorus of ghosts that won't take "later" for an answer, and one clerk who learns to say no to spectacle and yes to the living.Write us, or be written out, the book whispers.He answers, "Write with us, or be written wrong." Then the pages turn.