Dead Scripts: My New Horror Novel — Read to the End or Die

Dead Scripts: The Book That Started as a Handwritten Note at 1 AM

*By Lamin Ceesay, March 2026*

Some books begin with a grand plan. A structured outline. A neat proposal.

*Dead Scripts* began with a notebook, a pen, and a single terrifying question I wrote to myself on a cold night in March 2023:

“What if stopping a book, even for a single second, could kill you?”

Where It All Began

The original notes for Dead Scripts, written 2023 — The original notes for Dead Scripts were written in 2023.

That page above is where this book was born.

I remember the exact feeling. I had been thinking about curiosity — not as an abstract virtue, but as something that actually destroys people. History is full of brilliant minds who could not stop themselves from going further. Scientists, explorers, artists. Some of them paid a very high price for that need-to-know.

I wrote just these words: *Read to the end or die.*

Then I asked myself: could that be a literal rule? A book that is not a metaphor, but an actual trap? A thing that selects its readers and does not let go?

I started scribbling. Two writer friends. A holiday in The Gambia. A red book was found beside a skeleton on a coastal rock. What would a rational man do when he holds something that might kill him?

What would *you* do?

From Notebook to Manuscript

The core story was already there — two friends, a hotel, a cursed book.* — The core story was already there — two friends, a hotel, a cursed book.

story notes with plot outline: “Two writer buddy in vacation… found a Book on the Roadside…”

Where the actual writing happened — notes open, keyboard ready.* — Where the actual writing happened — notes open, keyboard ready.

I gave myself simple rules:

– 10,000 to 15,000 words. Long enough to breathe. Short enough to hold in one sitting.
– Set in The Gambia. I know it’s coast, it’s haze, it’s a particular kind of quiet that is not quiet at all.
– Write it for myself first. That is the only honest reason to start.

The two friends became Aqib and Jelani — both writers, both on holiday, both standing in front of something they absolutely should not touch.

Jelani touches it anyway.

What Dead Scripts Is About

Dead Scripts — Read to the End or Die. by lamin ceesay — Dead Scripts — Read to the End or Die. Available now on Amazon

Dead Scripts is a literary horror novella set in coastal Gambia.

Two writer friends, Aqib and Jelani, arrive at the Apollonian Hotel for a quiet holiday. On their first morning walk along the coast, they discover a skeleton gripping a thick red book — its bones covered in words. Jelani, being Jelani, takes the book.

The rule is simple and absolute: if you start reading, you must finish. If you stop, you die.

Hotel staff have already disappeared. A man in the monkey park dies mid-sentence. The book writes itself on the empty pages faster than you read. And Jelani, who has always believed that not knowing is the only real death, decides to read it anyway.

Dead Scripts asks what curiosity actually costs. It is a horror story about the one beast that man, from the beginning of time to now, cannot resist.

A Note on the Cover

The cover was designed to capture the exact image I saw when I wrote the first scene: a skeleton by the ocean, holding a red book, words written on every bone. The cabin is visible in the background — lit by lanterns in the dark.

If you have seen that image and felt something, then the book is for you.