Joel Felix
A conspiracy thriller built out of the gap between what was declassified and what was quietly left in the file.
The story behind the book
The Groom Lake Protocol started with a reading habit rather than a plan. Joel had spent years working through declassified material — programme budgets with line items blacked out, testimony that stopped mid-sentence, aircraft that officially did not exist until decades after they had stopped flying.
What interested him was never the answer. It was the shape of the hole where the answer should have been: the fact that a government can tell the truth and still, by choosing where to stop, leave something entirely different behind.
The novel grew out of that. A facility everyone can name and nobody can enter, and a protagonist whose problem is not finding the secret but deciding what to do once the secret turns out to be less interesting than the machinery built to keep it.
How the book was made
- 01 The idea Two years of reading declassified programme files, and a folder of the moments where the record simply stops.
- 02 The draft A first manuscript written around the research, then cut hard once it became clear the procedure was smothering the story.
- 03 Developmental edit The middle act rebuilt so the reveal lands on character rather than exposition.
- 04 Design and launch Cover, interior and metadata set to sit on the thriller shelf beside the books its readers already own.
Your book, made properly
Tell us where the manuscript is now. We will tell you honestly what it needs.