Plot: On his birthday, Walter Sparrow, an amiable dog-catcher, takes a call that leaves him dog bit and late to pick up his wife. She's browsed in a bookstore, finding a blood-red-covered novel, a murder mystery with numerology that loops constantly around the number 23. The story captivates Walter: he dreams it, he notices aspects of his life that can be rendered by "23," he searches for the author, he stays in the hotel (in room 23) where events in the novel took place, and he begins to believe it was no novel. His wife and son try to help him, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes to protect him. Slowly, with danger to himself and to his family, he closes in on the truth.

Tags: animal control worker, attempted suicide, author, blood, blood splatter, book, bookstore, bridge, cigarette smoking, corpse, death, detective, dogcatcher, driven mad, electronic music score, enigmatic, fall from height, fantasy becomes reality, fantasy sequence, female nudity, femme fatale, framed, hospital, husband wife relationship, insanity, knife, male nudity, mental institution, murder, nightmare, number in title, numerology, obsessive, paranoia, paranoid, premarital sex, profanity, psychiatrist, psycho thriller, psychological, psychological thriller, reading, shot in the head, shower, skeleton, slit throat, stabbed in the chest, stabbed to death, suicide, teacher student relationship, tense, throat slitting, title spoken by character, twist in the end, woods, wrongfully imprisoned, show all tags.