The drug was supposed to make the town sleep.
Instead, it made them dream the same thing.

The premise

Emily Sombrook is a painter with chronic insomnia who moves to Harlan's Fork, West Virginia, looking for quiet. What she finds instead is MaxaRest, a new prescription sleep aid the whole town has started taking, and a side effect no clinical trial disclosed. The drug lets sleeping minds briefly synchronize. In an isolated valley where a third of the town is on it, the dreams start bleeding into each other.

Emily's insomnia keeps her from fully merging with what the town is sharing. She only gets fragments, and she starts painting them before she understands what they mean. A flooded mine shaft. A man with no face. Forty-one pairs of hands.

In 1924, the Carmack Number Two shaft collapsed. The company that owned it entombed twenty-three miners alive rather than pay to dig them out, then told their families there had been an explosion. Harlan's Fork has spent a century quietly agreeing not to ask more questions. The drug didn't cause any of that. It just removed whatever had been keeping it buried.

About the author

Willa Ellie Maestro paints in her sleep.

Not metaphorically. She has woken up more than once to find a canvas finished that she has no memory of touching, the paint still wet, the image already whole. This unsettled her long before it interested her. She trained as a painter in her twenties at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a standalone public arts conservatory where she was able to live and breathe her craft, studying under teachers who cared about discipline more than talent. She spent most of two decades doing the unglamorous, steady work of a working painter. Portraits. Landscapes. Commissions for people who wanted a likeness or a memory captured honestly. It was a good life, and a quiet one, and she never expected it to become anything else.

Then she lost family during the pandemic, suddenly and without the kind of ending grief is supposed to have. No cause to point to. No moment where it made sense. Just the aftermath, sitting there, refusing to resolve. Something in her practice changed after that. The paintings got stranger. Faces she hadn't intended. Places she didn't recognize but somehow knew. She started writing because the paintings weren't saying enough on their own, and because putting words around an image was the only way she knew to ask it what it wanted.

She never trained as a writer, and it shows in a way she considers a strength. Her prose moves the way her painting does, patient in places, sudden in others, more interested in what a scene reveals than in explaining it outright. Her fiction starts where most people stop looking. A small town buries a disaster so completely that three generations grow up never hearing the word for it. A sleep drug meant to quiet the mind instead cracks it open, and the town's oldest secret starts leaking into people who never agreed to carry it. A painter keeps finding her own handwriting on canvases she swears she never touched.

The parallel is intentional. Emily Sombrook is not Willa, but she started as the question Willa couldn't stop asking herself after her own paintings began finishing without her: what would it mean if they were showing you something true?

Willa's characters are never the ones sent to investigate. They're the ones standing too close when the truth decides to surface anyway, an insomniac, an outsider, someone whose hands know something before their mind catches up. That's who she has always written, because it's closest to how she experiences her own work.

She still paints. She still doesn't always remember doing it. She says the canvases usually finish the sentence before she does.