Stan Kelly did not sit down one day and decide to write a book. The idea found him on a trip to Costa Rica, somewhere between a river valley and a conversation he could not stop thinking about afterward. He had spent nearly thirty years in IT and cybersecurity, built a career teaching the next generation of technology professionals, and raised a family in Texas. Writing was always there, nudged along by his father who handed him horror novels before he was old enough for them and pushed him toward the page until the very end. It was his wife who finally gave him the permission he had been waiting for. Stan sat down, and the world of The River’s Edge came out fully formed: the cursed bloodline, the fog over the river, the locket, and a teenage girl trying to figure out what the curse demands before it’s too late.