Edward Franklin Booker is a character in Alan Wake 2. Husband of Tammy Booker, he visits Bright Falls alongside his wife to help her research the 2010 disappearance of novelist Alan Wake.
Biography
Background
Born and residing in New York, Ed Booker is a playwright and director. Ed's one-act plays were met with limited success, and he relied on Tammy's income to support his playwriting.[1]
Events of Alan Wake 2
Return
On the day prior to the arrival of the FBI agents, Ed and Tammy use boltcutters to breach the Cauldron Lake barrier fence. They set up a camp by the lake, and on that night, they witnessed the reappearance of Robert Nightingale as a Taken from afar. Not realizing what he was, they only saw him as a strange nude man in the woods and decided not to approach him. Shortly after, they found the Cult of the Tree in the midst of killing Nightingale and, believing they had found a crime in progress, quickly ran away and called the police. The cultists were forced to stop the ritual and flee to avoid discovery, inadvertently allowing Nightingale to remain a threat.
The following day, he and Tammy found themselves at the Oh Deer Diner, having been brought there by Sheriff Tim Breaker after they were interviewed by the Sheriff Department. They were briefly interviewed by Saga and asked to surrender the cultist necklace they discovered. Later on, the Bookers had a heated argument, resulting in Ed angrily leaving the diner and driving the rental car back to Cauldron Lake.[2] In the evening, Ed was discovered and forcibly restrained by an unidentified group[3] -- revealed in Return Addendum: The Lake House to be the Federal Bureau of Control.
The Lake House
As Kiran Estevez explored the Lake House, she found Ed locked in a cell. Ed believed that he had secretly been taken to what he thought was an immersive writing workshop set up by his wife Tammy, and believed Kiran was just an actor. Per documents found around the area, he had been abducted on Diana Marmont's orders and was given the task of trying to write manuscript pages as a means of replicating Alan Wake's work while being completely oblivious to what was going on around him. Unfortunately for Diana’s team, Booker failed to recreate Wake’s style of writing as he was clueless to what he was writing about, with Booker describing the Marmonts in one manuscript page as a happily married couple enjoying their time off from work and the Lake House facility as an actual lakeside cabin.
When Kiran was able to close the threshold on level -5, he and Kiran both appeared outside the gates leading up to the Lake House.
Initiation
Play Director
In Initiation 5: Room 665, Detective Casey is investigating a murder that occurred in Room 108 of the Oceanview Hotel. The Play Director (played by Ed) led an acting troupe which performed "The Cult," an immersive play held in the same hotel, and provides Casey with details surrounding the play.
From the Play Director, we learn the play had been plagued by strange incidents ever since the pre-show ritual, mostly revolving around a mystery celebrity playing the role of The Devil. The actor never interacted with the rest of the cast and never broke character. Furthermore, we learn The Devil knew the leading lady, The Muse, and had joined the play solely to murder her.
Eternal Deerfest
The Bookers did not leave Bright Falls before September 15, 2023, and were caught in the radius when Scratch used the Clicker to make Bright Falls manifest his ending of Return. The two can be found in front of the Oh Deer Diner, standing around and wearing deer masks, and praising Return like everyone else trapped in the Eternal Deerfest.
Trivia
- He and his wife Tammy are the inverse foils of Alan and his wife Alice; both loving couples were artists with one being successful (Alan, Tammy) while the other's success (Alice and Ed) was due to their more successful spouse's support and influence causing a slight sore spot with people calling into question whether they actually had talent (Alan exclusively used Alice's photos for his book covers despite criticism from others, Ed remarks that his plays were financed by his wife, and not very popular), both went to Bright Falls with one experiencing artist's block, had a fight that led to one going off to calm down that resulted in a spouse being abducted and held prisoner leaving the other spouse feeling guilty (Alice was abducted by The Dark Presence, Ed was abducted by FBC scientists that had gone rouge)
- At some point Tammy appears by herself panicking as she can't find Ed. The Lake House expansion reveals he was captured by FBC scientists for an unauthorized experiment where they intended to have him mimic Alan Wake's writing with the belief that doing so would cause the writing to affect reality like Wake.
- Documents at the Lake House reveal that Ed was repeatedly told that he was NOT in a writing workshop, that he was in a government facility for an experiment with the goal of having him being able to copy Alan Wake's writing style to the point where it was indistinguishable from the real thing...and that he just didn't believe them, leaving the scientists bewildered and exasperated with him.
- Other documents indicate that Diana Marmont planned to start slowly torturing him theorizing that art created in anguish and despair had the greatest influence on The Dark Presence.
Appearances
- Alan Wake 2
- Prologue: The Cult
- Return 1: Invitation
- Initiation 5: Room 665 (voice only as the "Play Director")
- Return 8: Deerfest
- Return Addendum: The Lake House
Gallery
