The Sudden Stop is a book written by Alan Wake and the last one he wrote before he got writers' block. The book was the last in a series of successful novels about Detective Alex Casey, whom Wake ultimately chose to kill off in the last book.
According to the Manuscript pages found throughout the game, "The Sudden Stop" seems to share a lot of similarities with the story of Max Payne. This is not surprising since Alan Wake and Max Payne were made by the same studio, Remedy Entertainment.
Manuscript pages[]
The Sudden Stop 1[]
It's true what they say about the fall and the sudden stop at the end.
I'd lain here in the snow while the lurid chain of scenes that had led me here kept playing in my head, a rerun of my own private snuff movie, a memory of my corpse. Alone at my own wake. Thinking in metaphors again.
The Femme Fatale was gone.
Only a sour taste remained of the kiss that killed me.
The Sudden Stop 2[]
This was a late goodbye. Thirteen years after I'd gotten my revenge, it finally caught up with me. It'd been a long time to bear the pain.
My blood painted the snow red - a gruesome slushie - dissolved all the scattered painkillers, and leisurely dripped down to the sewer, mingling with the bile of the city, becoming one with it.
I can see them now, my wife and my baby.
Honey, I'm home.
Trivia[]
- If you look around the back of the car crash in Alan's Nightmare, you will find it littered with copies of the Sudden Stop. The hitchhiker in the beginning of the game could be a nod at Alex Casey, the main character in "The Sudden Stop", the title perhaps referring to Alan's fateful crash.
- In The Signal, copies of The Sudden Stop are possessed and attack Alan, acting like ravens.
- "Honey, I'm home", the last line of manuscript home, was the first thing Alan said in the same sequence the pages could be picked up from. The words are also spoken by Max Payne in prologue.
- "This was a late goodbye" is a reference to either the song Late Goodbye from Max Payne 2 by Poets of the Fall, or to Sam Lake's poem of the same name that inspired the song.
- "Alone at my own wake" is quoted in the Old Gods of Asgard track Balance Slays the Demon, featured in Alan Wake's American Nightmare.
- The 2 pages regarding The Sudden Stop are read by James McCaffrey, who provides the voice-over for Max Payne.
- Copies of The Sudden Stop are sprinkled throughout Quantum Break, most notably in Chapter 2, Act 2 where a signed copy can be found on a gurney.
- In Control, Langston in the Panopticon mentions that "The Sudden Stop hits theaters tonight. I can't believe I'm missing an Alex Casey movie for this."
- As Control takes place in late October 2019, this would seem to indicate that Alan's entire Alex Casey series had been made into films between 2010 and then, allowing for the last book to be adapted to screen.
- This conflicts, however, with emails sent by Barry Wheeler to Alice Wake in Alan Wake 2, where we learn Barry moved to Hollywood in 2021 to protect Alan's creative legacy and became executive producer overseeing film production by 2023.