Alan Wake disappeared in 2010. He was a best-selling author based in New York. On vacation in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Alice Wake, he encountered a force of supernatural darkness. This brought to life Wake's written work, a horror story. He fought this dark presence and managed to banish it back to where it came from, a nightmarish dark place hidden beneath a caldera lake outside the small town of Bright Falls. Wake wrote an ending to his horror story and with it freed his wife from the darkness beneath the lake, but he himself became trapped there.
Alan Wake is not dead, though he has wished many times that he were. For 13 years he has been imprisoned in the Dark Place, where his nightmares, fears, and stories manifest as reality around him. For 13 years he has struggled to remain sane and to write a story that will change the reality around him so he can escape. So far, he has failed.
