The answer to the question "who is Tom Zane, really?" is a resounding "we don't have enough information to say." But Tom remains one of the great enigmas of Alan Wake II.
The biggest oddness about it is how different he is from the Thomas Zane we meet in the original game.
Thomas (and I use the long name and short name to distinguish them) is a poet, whose own experience losing his girlfriend Barbara Jagger to the depths of Cauldron Lake serves as a parallel and cautionary tale to Alan's story losing Alice.
The story we get in the first game is essentially this: Thomas and Barbara had the Bird Leg Cabin on Diver's Isle within the caldera of Cauldron Lake, and lived relatively happily there in the late 1960s. Thomas was a poet, and had a friend/assistant in Emile Hartman. One day, Barbara drowned in the lake, but Thomas and Emile had also discovered the lake's strange effect in making art turn into reality. So, to save his beloved, Thomas wrote some poetry (which we have not found, as far as I know) that told of Barbara coming back to life. And it worked... sort of. The problem, at least according to Alan, is that Thomas didn't earn Barbara's resurrection. So, instead, Barbara returned as a horrid, monstrous creature that would come to be called the Scratching Hag. We don't know exactly what she did in this form, but Thomas wound up cutting out her heart in an attempt to put down this monster with his beloved's face.
Later, Barbara Jagger would intervene in Alan Wake's visit to Bright Falls and send him and Alice to that same cabin, where Alice would fall into the lake and put Alan in the same situation.
Thomas Zane, who descended into the lake as well, acts as a spiritual guide and mentor to Alan over the course of that first game, appearing to him before they even arrive in Bright Falls on the ferry during a nightmare.
But let's take a couple things into account:
This version of Zane is never seen in person - the form he takes is of a glowing light within a diving suit. Thomas was an avid diver, and so this "diver" form reflects him in life. He's also voiced by James McCaffrey.
Written in 2012, in the "This House of Dreams" blog, a little ARG-style bit of internet fiction, a person named Samantha (I'd guess a little hint that it was written by Sam Lake) buys a house in Ordinary, Maine (almost as if a decade earlier all the real estate suddenly became available for... some reason) and finds within a shoebox that is filled with poems. These poems are clearly written by Thomas Zane, and include some that were referenced in the original Alan Wake game.
The blog has something of a happy epilogue for Thomas and Barbara, where both the avatars that we meet in the first game are not truly them, but presences that have taken over their bodies. The Dark Presence took Barbara's and the Light Presence took Thomas', but their actual souls went on to live in some baby pocket universe of Thomas' creation where the two could be happy forever.
But in Alan Wake II, and actually starting in Control, we're told that story is fiction.
In Control, a recording of one of Jesse's therapy sessions (and boy is it not cool that the FBC has recordings of those) she refers to Thomas Zane as a poet, but the therapist claims she hasn't heard of that person, unless Jesse means the filmmaker Tom Zane, from Finland. During the AWE expansion, Jesse eavesdrops on a conversation between Tom Zane and Alan Wake through the spiral door at the Oceanview Motel.
Notably, while the look and exact wording of the conversation is different, the overall shape of it is the same as the one that Alan has at the start of the "Room 665" chapter in Alan Wake II. I'd originally thought these were two separate events, but after watching both scenes, I'm now convinced that these are simply different "drafts" of the same conversation, and Jesse's appearance on the TV at the end of the one in Alan Wake II is likely her time in the middle of her trip to the Investigations Sector.
The point is, this "filmmaker" version of Zane is very different.
He does act a bit as a guide to Alan in the early parts of the game, but there's a sinister aspect to him that was not at all present in the first game. Each time Alan leaves Mr. Door's studio, he gets a call from Zane on the payphone, eventually meeting him in his room at the Oceanview Hotel.
Actually, to be precise, we meet him within a film projected on a wall in the Oceanview Hotel. My interpretation is that Alan's consciousness jumps from the video game version of himself to the live-action one, so that he truly experiences entering the non-bare Room 665, but it might be worth mentioning that this is all technically a film within the hotel.
Like the world around us has tried to convince us, Zane claims that the Poet is just a character that he played in his most popular movie. In some of the background we're able to get in Saga's half of the game, Zane came to America with a lot of promise as this gifted immigrant artist, but went missing after only Tom the Poet was made in the U.S.
But there's some weirdness - the poster for Tom the Poet, which you can even find in Alan Wake Remastered (the version of the game that I've played,) credits the movie as being based on the work of Alan Wake - despite the fact that Wake was born in I think 1978 and Zane went missing eight years before that.
It's certainly possible that Zane the filmmaker is the real one. As we've seen with Alex Casey, Wake was able to see into an existing person's life and reshape it for the narrative of his fiction. There's some speculation from the first game that Wake might have written Zane as a kind of "first draft" of Departure, and had to make himself the protagonist for it to work. So, you could imagine that he had created this poet persona out of Zane.
But it seems far more likely that some kind of inverse is true - that the Poet is the real Zane, and that this filmmaker is the false one.
Honestly, I think the strongest evidence is Jesse Faden's therapy interview - Jesse remembered the poet as a kid, quoting the same poem that was so beloved (and probably misunderstood) by Emile Hartman. Only after she glimpses in through the spiral door - likely seeing the very conversation that we have in Room 665, or perhaps an earlier draft of it (which, on a meta level, is sort of literal) does her memory seem to rewrite it so that he's the filmmaker.
But here's the thing that I keep wondering:
If this guy's a filmmaker, why does he keep reciting his poetry?
Now, sure, sure, there's cover here because Tom the Poet is Tom Zane's most popular character.
But I think it's notable that, in key moments in Alan Wake II, Zane recites poems that Samantha found in that shoebox in her house in Ordinary.
The first he recites when Alan enters "The House of Zane," and is as follows:
"In this temple of shadow and mist,
There's a window
In the floor and
A door in the ceiling
There is no knowing
Am I standing still
Or running or kneeling"
As a note here, the page that Samantha finds here shows the last two lines have been scratched out, and the ones we have are handwritten, but the scratched out words are too well covered in ink to read (the poems are typed out - and as an aside, while I'm sure it's meant to be typewritten, this is clearly written in something like Microsoft word, because the text is a little too clean and every line has a capitalized letter, the way that an autocorrect system would make it. I'm inclined to believe this doesn't have any deeper meaning and was likely just an oversight when making the pages for the blog).
Later, at the onset of the Zane's Film chapter, Alan seems to shoot Zane in the head after the mad filmmaker strangely starts looking creepy and terrifying and trading places with Alan through some weird film edit. But as soon as Alan leaves the "film world" version of Room 665, the still-running movie has Zane awaken from his seemingly lethal wound and recite:
"Oh mercy
Thousands have gone missing
Beyond the labyrinth of me
When you're lost
You're lost in your own company."
This, it turns out, is actually only half of one of the shoebox poems. The full version is:
"I wish it would shatter
Like glass under my heels
Just like a sheet of ice
When I close my eyes
That's how the mirror feels
Oh mercy
Thousands have gone missing
Beyond the labyrinth of me
When you're lost
You're lost in your own company"
The page this is typed on has more annotations - there's a strange set of symbols that might represent the Writer's Room, with two big circular windows, as well as a sketch of a man's face (it reminds me a little of Tim Breaker's police sketch of Warlin Door, though my read of this sketch is that it depicts a white person, which is an admittedly difficult thing to be certain of in a simple pen sketch on white paper). There's also a drawing of some trees over a bit of water - likely Cauldron Lake. And finally, there's a handwritten note that says:
"In this hall of mirrors
Built by liars
I am a pale reflection of myself"
-Pool
This is, evidently, a reference to something from one of the Max Payne games, in which I believe the in-universe show Address Unknown, which has weird parallels to Alan Wake II (a man in a place called Noir York City being chased by his doppelganger).
The point is:
The influence of the poems of Thomas Zane are felt elsewhere in the game as well - in the chapter song after Scratch's big reveal in Saga's storyline, the song "Dark, Twisted, and Cruel" borrows lines from a poem whose page is torn into four pieces and has its first verse X'd out. I haven't done a careful reading of the lyrics of the other chapter songs, but I would not be surprised to see more of these poems influencing them.
So... what do we take from all of this?
Well, we could look at the poems he chooses to use.
The first one, which he uses as a kind of greeting to Alan when he enters, feels reasonably straightforward. This temple of shadow and mist could be the Dark Place, or it could be his own "House of Zane." The window in the floor and door in the ceiling almost seems to parallel Alice's notion of ascension and destruction, but as the poem says, there's no knowing how you're oriented - are you on the right track, running toward your goal? Or are you submitting to the darkness (and yeah, there's definitely a weird sexual aspect to that, and the way Zane delivers this line,) or are you just getting nowhere, standing still? I don't know if there's anything really beyond that.
But what about the next one?
First off, he cuts off the first half of the poem. To be fair, I think the second verse is the more impactful one. Still, it might inform the second verse in a way that is lost here. What is the "labyrinth of me?" In the poem, I'm tempted to say that we're sort of seeing how when you break a mirror, it becomes many smaller mirrors, each shard now at slightly different angles and thus giving us many different reflections. The "labyrinth of me" could thus refer to the way that the cracks in a mirror form a kind of branching maze, outlining all these new reflections. This feels like a good parallel to how there are so many versions of Alan - we have the three looping drafts of Initiation and their different Alans who interfere with each other over the course of the game, along with Mr. Scratch (in his multiple versions as well - the suave psycho killer from American nightmare and the... horrifying brute psycho killer we glimpse in the cloud of darkness, and which is what he sort of becomes when possessed in the real world) and now Zane... now multiple versions of Zane. All of whom look alike.
All reflections of the same thing, maybe? When you're lost, you're lost in your own company.
Hey, you know something crazy?
Did you know that the voices of the Restless Shadows in the Dark Place are all done by Matthew Poretta? Did you know that, behind the weird optical distortions, they... also look like Alan?
The vast majority of people/entities that Alan interacts with in this game are just other versions of him. He's in the labyrinth of himself, lost in his own company.
What does that mean for Zane? Is he another version of Alan? Is Alan another version of him?
No clue, but boy it's interesting to think about.
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