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Rhea’s Game: Paris Book Festival Runner-Up · A Psychological Survival Thriller
Rhea’s A Psychological Survival Thriller
Previously published as Chloroform Wars, Runner-Up (Wild Card) at the Paris Book Festival.
This revised edition includes two additional chapters.
What if your pain was entertainment and your silence made you a star?
In a fractured America where televised obedience replaces free will, teens are forced into live survival competitions. Victory means staying visible. Losing means humiliation, punishment, and erasure—and the whole nation is watching.
Ryker Vale just wanted a paycheck. Rhea Schwartz wanted a voice.
They didn’t expect to be matched against each other.
Now, they’ll either take down the system or become part of the show.
Dark, unsettling, and uncomfortably plausible, Rhea’s Game is a psychological survival thriller about power, surveillance, and what happens when suffering becomes entertainment.
Perfect for fans of Black Mirror, The Hunger Games, and Battle Royale.
Previously published as Chloroform Wars, Runner-Up (Wild Card) at the Paris Book Festival.
This revised edition includes two additional chapters.
What if your pain was entertainment and your silence made you a star?
In a fractured America where televised obedience replaces free will, teens are forced into live survival competitions. Victory means staying visible. Losing means humiliation, punishment, and erasure—and the whole nation is watching.
Ryker Vale just wanted a paycheck. Rhea Schwartz wanted a voice.
They didn’t expect to be matched against each other.
Now, they’ll either take down the system or become part of the show.
Dark, unsettling, and uncomfortably plausible, Rhea’s Game is a psychological survival thriller about power, surveillance, and what happens when suffering becomes entertainment.
Perfect for fans of Black Mirror, The Hunger Games, and Battle Royale.
266 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 5, 2026
About the author
Dan Uselton
8 books43 followersAbout the Author
Dan Uselton writes fiction that doesn’t flinch from hard questions about power, control, and the cost of freedom. His novel Chloroform Wars was a Runner-Up (Wild Card) at the Paris Book Festival.
From televised dystopian game shows to time-bent romances and shadowed killers, his stories challenge authority, unmask spectacle, and ask what it really takes to resist.
Working across dystopian, psychological thriller, and speculative fiction, Dan builds dark, immersive worlds where ordinary people face impossible choices: obey, rebel, or survive. His latest trilogy—Chloroform Wars, My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: A Time-Travel Saga, and Memoirs of a Serial Killer—drops readers into harsh futures, twisted realities, and morally gray shadows.
When he’s not writing, Dan is probably buried in a library stack or fueling new worlds with too much coffee. He lives in Oregon.
Dan Uselton writes fiction that doesn’t flinch from hard questions about power, control, and the cost of freedom. His novel Chloroform Wars was a Runner-Up (Wild Card) at the Paris Book Festival.
From televised dystopian game shows to time-bent romances and shadowed killers, his stories challenge authority, unmask spectacle, and ask what it really takes to resist.
Working across dystopian, psychological thriller, and speculative fiction, Dan builds dark, immersive worlds where ordinary people face impossible choices: obey, rebel, or survive. His latest trilogy—Chloroform Wars, My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: A Time-Travel Saga, and Memoirs of a Serial Killer—drops readers into harsh futures, twisted realities, and morally gray shadows.
When he’s not writing, Dan is probably buried in a library stack or fueling new worlds with too much coffee. He lives in Oregon.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 1, 2026
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Fiction. 5 Stars!
I read Rhea’s Game by Dan Uselton, and at its core, it’s a dystopian psychological survival thriller about control, spectacle, and the quiet violence of systems that pretend to offer choice. The story follows Rhea and Ryker, two working-class teenagers caught inside a society where a brutal reality show, Chloroform Wars, has become ordinary background noise. Winning brings money and temporary safety. Losing brings public humiliation that lingers long after the cameras cut away. Told through alternating perspectives, the book traces what happens when survival, loyalty, and coercion grind against each other inside a machine designed to extract pain and call it entertainment.
What hit me first was how intentional the discomfort feels. Uselton doesn’t flinch or hurry through the hard parts. He lets them sprawl. Shame, fear, and moral compromise are given room to breathe, which makes them heavier. The dual perspectives work especially well here. Ryker’s chapters feel boxed in, crowded with guilt and second-guessing, his thoughts looping like a bad echo. Rhea’s sections are more restrained but sharper at the edges. Her resistance isn’t loud or theatrical. It’s refusal. It’s control reclaimed through stillness. That choice feels precise rather than poetic, and it carries real weight.
The handling of power is where the book excels. There are no cartoon villains, no dramatic speeches about evil. Instead, there are contracts, incentives, polished smiles, and people who insist this is simply how the world functions. The executives and politicians are unsettling because they’re calm, competent, and utterly unbothered. The prose stays mostly clean and unadorned, which makes the darker moments land harder. When figurative language shows up, it earns its place, often tied to breath, pressure, or physical limits. The pacing mirrors the story’s emotional rhythm, tightening under the gaze of the cameras and loosening just enough in private moments to remind you what’s at stake.
Rhea’s Game left me uneasy in a way that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous. It sits firmly in the dystopian psychological thriller genre, with a sharp streak of social satire running through it, especially in how it examines media consumption and our tolerance for cruelty when it’s framed as spectacle. I’d recommend it to readers who gravitate toward dark speculative fiction that asks hard ethical questions without rushing to comfort. If you like stories that explore agency, exploitation, and quiet defiance, then you’ll really enjoy this book. Rhea’s Game feels like a darker, more intimate cousin to The Hunger Games, trading large-scale rebellion and spectacle for a tighter psychological focus on coercion, consent, and what survival quietly erodes when the cameras never look away.
-Literary Titan
Pages: 268 | ASIN : B0G7VWM8QN
I read Rhea’s Game by Dan Uselton, and at its core, it’s a dystopian psychological survival thriller about control, spectacle, and the quiet violence of systems that pretend to offer choice. The story follows Rhea and Ryker, two working-class teenagers caught inside a society where a brutal reality show, Chloroform Wars, has become ordinary background noise. Winning brings money and temporary safety. Losing brings public humiliation that lingers long after the cameras cut away. Told through alternating perspectives, the book traces what happens when survival, loyalty, and coercion grind against each other inside a machine designed to extract pain and call it entertainment.
What hit me first was how intentional the discomfort feels. Uselton doesn’t flinch or hurry through the hard parts. He lets them sprawl. Shame, fear, and moral compromise are given room to breathe, which makes them heavier. The dual perspectives work especially well here. Ryker’s chapters feel boxed in, crowded with guilt and second-guessing, his thoughts looping like a bad echo. Rhea’s sections are more restrained but sharper at the edges. Her resistance isn’t loud or theatrical. It’s refusal. It’s control reclaimed through stillness. That choice feels precise rather than poetic, and it carries real weight.
The handling of power is where the book excels. There are no cartoon villains, no dramatic speeches about evil. Instead, there are contracts, incentives, polished smiles, and people who insist this is simply how the world functions. The executives and politicians are unsettling because they’re calm, competent, and utterly unbothered. The prose stays mostly clean and unadorned, which makes the darker moments land harder. When figurative language shows up, it earns its place, often tied to breath, pressure, or physical limits. The pacing mirrors the story’s emotional rhythm, tightening under the gaze of the cameras and loosening just enough in private moments to remind you what’s at stake.
Rhea’s Game left me uneasy in a way that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous. It sits firmly in the dystopian psychological thriller genre, with a sharp streak of social satire running through it, especially in how it examines media consumption and our tolerance for cruelty when it’s framed as spectacle. I’d recommend it to readers who gravitate toward dark speculative fiction that asks hard ethical questions without rushing to comfort. If you like stories that explore agency, exploitation, and quiet defiance, then you’ll really enjoy this book. Rhea’s Game feels like a darker, more intimate cousin to The Hunger Games, trading large-scale rebellion and spectacle for a tighter psychological focus on coercion, consent, and what survival quietly erodes when the cameras never look away.
-Literary Titan
Pages: 268 | ASIN : B0G7VWM8QN
Review of advance copy received from Author
I read Rhea’s Game by Dan Uselton, and at its core, it’s a dystopian psychological survival thriller about control, spectacle, and the quiet violence of systems that pretend to offer choice. The story follows Rhea and Ryker, two working-class teenagers caught inside a society where a brutal reality show, Chloroform Wars, has become ordinary background noise. Winning brings money and temporary safety. Losing brings public humiliation that lingers long after the cameras cut away. Told through alternating perspectives, the book traces what happens when survival, loyalty, and coercion grind against each other inside a machine designed to extract pain and call it entertainment.
What hit me first was how intentional the discomfort feels. Uselton doesn’t flinch or hurry through the hard parts. He lets them sprawl. Shame, fear, and moral compromise are given room to breathe, which makes them heavier. The dual perspectives work especially well here. Ryker’s chapters feel boxed in, crowded with guilt and second-guessing, his thoughts looping like a bad echo. Rhea’s sections are more restrained but sharper at the edges. Her resistance isn’t loud or theatrical. It’s refusal. It’s control reclaimed through stillness. That choice feels precise rather than poetic, and it carries real weight.
The handling of power is where the book excels. There are no cartoon villains, no dramatic speeches about evil. Instead, there are contracts, incentives, polished smiles, and people who insist this is simply how the world functions. The executives and politicians are unsettling because they’re calm, competent, and utterly unbothered. The prose stays mostly clean and unadorned, which makes the darker moments land harder. When figurative language shows up, it earns its place, often tied to breath, pressure, or physical limits. The pacing mirrors the story’s emotional rhythm, tightening under the gaze of the cameras and loosening just enough in private moments to remind you what’s at stake.
Rhea’s Game left me uneasy in a way that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous. It sits firmly in the dystopian psychological thriller genre, with a sharp streak of social satire running through it, especially in how it examines media consumption and our tolerance for cruelty when it’s framed as spectacle. I’d recommend it to readers who gravitate toward dark speculative fiction that asks hard ethical questions without rushing to comfort. If you like stories that explore agency, exploitation, and quiet defiance, then you'll really enjoy this book. Rhea’s Game feels like a darker, more intimate cousin to The Hunger Games, trading large-scale rebellion and spectacle for a tighter psychological focus on coercion, consent, and what survival quietly erodes when the cameras never look away.
What hit me first was how intentional the discomfort feels. Uselton doesn’t flinch or hurry through the hard parts. He lets them sprawl. Shame, fear, and moral compromise are given room to breathe, which makes them heavier. The dual perspectives work especially well here. Ryker’s chapters feel boxed in, crowded with guilt and second-guessing, his thoughts looping like a bad echo. Rhea’s sections are more restrained but sharper at the edges. Her resistance isn’t loud or theatrical. It’s refusal. It’s control reclaimed through stillness. That choice feels precise rather than poetic, and it carries real weight.
The handling of power is where the book excels. There are no cartoon villains, no dramatic speeches about evil. Instead, there are contracts, incentives, polished smiles, and people who insist this is simply how the world functions. The executives and politicians are unsettling because they’re calm, competent, and utterly unbothered. The prose stays mostly clean and unadorned, which makes the darker moments land harder. When figurative language shows up, it earns its place, often tied to breath, pressure, or physical limits. The pacing mirrors the story’s emotional rhythm, tightening under the gaze of the cameras and loosening just enough in private moments to remind you what’s at stake.
Rhea’s Game left me uneasy in a way that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous. It sits firmly in the dystopian psychological thriller genre, with a sharp streak of social satire running through it, especially in how it examines media consumption and our tolerance for cruelty when it’s framed as spectacle. I’d recommend it to readers who gravitate toward dark speculative fiction that asks hard ethical questions without rushing to comfort. If you like stories that explore agency, exploitation, and quiet defiance, then you'll really enjoy this book. Rhea’s Game feels like a darker, more intimate cousin to The Hunger Games, trading large-scale rebellion and spectacle for a tighter psychological focus on coercion, consent, and what survival quietly erodes when the cameras never look away.
February 4, 2026
Rhea’s Game is a dark dystopian novel that I found deeply uncomfortable and, at times, disturbing. That discomfort is clearly intentional. The author states in the footnotes and on his website that the book is not for the faint-hearted and “some truths aren’t meant to be comfortable”, and in that sense it delivers exactly what it promises. The concept at the heart of the novel is strong, but for me the execution fell short of its potential.
The story explores a near-future American reality where desperate individuals submit themselves to acts of self-humiliation for financial gain, driven by poverty and the need to support their families. A powerful TV network exploits this desperation, transforming private degradation into voyeuristic entertainment with soaring ratings. The premise immediately brings to mind a Black Mirror episode, and it’s easy to see why the novel has resonated with many readers. It was previously published under a different title, was runner up for an award, and has attracted a large number of five-star reviews. For the right audience, this will undoubtedly be a compelling and provocative read.
While the sexual acts are implied rather than graphically described, the material is still confronting. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone unprepared for its provocative themes. What I found most challenging was the participants’ complete loss of moral compass. Their shared understanding and forgiveness of one another’s actions, born out of collective desperation, creates an unsettling atmosphere where self-worth is steadily eroded. As the stakes escalate, so does the audience’s and TV executives’ appetite, making the novel’s vision of reality TV feel disturbingly plausible.
The story centres on Rhea and Ryker, childhood sweethearts who find themselves competing in the show. Unfortunately, I found their characterisation rather thin, which made it difficult to fully invest in their fate. The dystopian elements often overshadow the thriller aspects, and I found myself wishing the tension and thriller plotline had been pushed further, allowing me to truly root for the characters.
That said, Rhea’s Game succeeded in making me think and in making me uncomfortable. While it wasn’t a novel I enjoyed, it undeniably achieved its intended purpose and that alone makes it an interesting, if unsettling, read.
Many thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.
The story explores a near-future American reality where desperate individuals submit themselves to acts of self-humiliation for financial gain, driven by poverty and the need to support their families. A powerful TV network exploits this desperation, transforming private degradation into voyeuristic entertainment with soaring ratings. The premise immediately brings to mind a Black Mirror episode, and it’s easy to see why the novel has resonated with many readers. It was previously published under a different title, was runner up for an award, and has attracted a large number of five-star reviews. For the right audience, this will undoubtedly be a compelling and provocative read.
While the sexual acts are implied rather than graphically described, the material is still confronting. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone unprepared for its provocative themes. What I found most challenging was the participants’ complete loss of moral compass. Their shared understanding and forgiveness of one another’s actions, born out of collective desperation, creates an unsettling atmosphere where self-worth is steadily eroded. As the stakes escalate, so does the audience’s and TV executives’ appetite, making the novel’s vision of reality TV feel disturbingly plausible.
The story centres on Rhea and Ryker, childhood sweethearts who find themselves competing in the show. Unfortunately, I found their characterisation rather thin, which made it difficult to fully invest in their fate. The dystopian elements often overshadow the thriller aspects, and I found myself wishing the tension and thriller plotline had been pushed further, allowing me to truly root for the characters.
That said, Rhea’s Game succeeded in making me think and in making me uncomfortable. While it wasn’t a novel I enjoyed, it undeniably achieved its intended purpose and that alone makes it an interesting, if unsettling, read.
Many thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.
March 29, 2026
I read Rhea’s Game by Dan Uselton, and overall,l I’d call it a solid 4-star read for me. What really stood out is the premise: a near-future world where people pushed by poverty agree to humiliating reality shows for money. At the same time, the powerful media system turns their desperation into entertainment. It’s uncomfortable by design, and the book doesn’t shy away from that.
I liked the ideas behind it, especially the commentary on media influence and how systems can normalize things that should feel wrong. At times, the world felt a bit too believable, which made the story stick with me more than I expected.
The story mainly follows Rhea and Ryker, and I appreciated the alternating perspectives. That said, I did find myself wishing for a little more depth in parts of their development, and I would have liked the thriller tension to be pushed just a bit further. The concept is strong enough that I kept wanting even more from it.
It’s also worth mentioning that the tone is quite heavy throughout. Some scenes are implied rather than explicit, but the themes are still pretty confronting, so it won’t be for everyone.
Still, I’m glad I read it. It’s a bold dystopian story that raises interesting questions and leaves an impression. If you like darker speculative fiction that leans into psychological pressure and social commentary, this one is definitely worth picking up. For me, it lands at a strong 4 stars.
I liked the ideas behind it, especially the commentary on media influence and how systems can normalize things that should feel wrong. At times, the world felt a bit too believable, which made the story stick with me more than I expected.
The story mainly follows Rhea and Ryker, and I appreciated the alternating perspectives. That said, I did find myself wishing for a little more depth in parts of their development, and I would have liked the thriller tension to be pushed just a bit further. The concept is strong enough that I kept wanting even more from it.
It’s also worth mentioning that the tone is quite heavy throughout. Some scenes are implied rather than explicit, but the themes are still pretty confronting, so it won’t be for everyone.
Still, I’m glad I read it. It’s a bold dystopian story that raises interesting questions and leaves an impression. If you like darker speculative fiction that leans into psychological pressure and social commentary, this one is definitely worth picking up. For me, it lands at a strong 4 stars.
April 25, 2026
Rhea’s Game by Dan Uselton delivers a suspenseful and unsettling story that keeps you hooked from the start. The premise is chilling, and the author does a great job building tension and maintaining a constant sense of unease throughout the book.
Rhea is a compelling protagonist, and her psychological journey is both intense and thought-provoking. The pacing is strong for most of the story, with plenty of twists to keep readers engaged. Some moments feel slightly predictable or drawn out, but they don’t take away too much from the overall experience.
The atmosphere is where this book really shines as it is dark, claustrophobic, and emotionally charged. If you enjoy psychological thrillers that focus on survival and mind games, this is definitely worth picking up.
Overall, a gripping read with just a few minor flaws, well worth four stars.
Rhea is a compelling protagonist, and her psychological journey is both intense and thought-provoking. The pacing is strong for most of the story, with plenty of twists to keep readers engaged. Some moments feel slightly predictable or drawn out, but they don’t take away too much from the overall experience.
The atmosphere is where this book really shines as it is dark, claustrophobic, and emotionally charged. If you enjoy psychological thrillers that focus on survival and mind games, this is definitely worth picking up.
Overall, a gripping read with just a few minor flaws, well worth four stars.
March 2, 2026
What sets this story apart is not just the twists and suspense, but the way it explores how a person copes when everything familiar is stripped away. Rhea isn’t just surviving, she’s learning who she is in the process. Readers who appreciate character-driven thrillers will find themselves genuinely invested in her emotional journey, not just the plot.
March 12, 2026
A unique story everyone should read. Eventually the media becomes a monopoly with no rules or guidelines. Feminism is replaced with traditionalism.
Men run the country and the airwaves. Very plausible outcome for the future. 5 STARS
Men run the country and the airwaves. Very plausible outcome for the future. 5 STARS
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews