The Dark Game

A promising premise—fictional characters inspired by indiscretions in their authors’ pasts coming to life and preying on their creators—is undermined by the meandering pace of this horror novel’s events. World-renowned author Roderick Wells has invited 10 writers to his Indiana mansion to participate in a six-week contest from which (he promises) only one will emerge “the next Legendary Author.” When he autocratically demands that they all write horror stories (“Everything begins with horror,” he proclaims), the authors begin channeling emotions aroused by “terrible secrets” from their pasts—betrayals, derelictions, even murders—into characters who acquire enough physical substance to begin picking them off in and-then-there-were-none fashion. It eventually becomes clear that the participants were chosen for their secrets as much as for their writing prowess, but not until readers endure chapter upon chapter of the writers flagellating themselves for their psychic wounds. A pyrotechnic finale that reveals the true reason for Wells’s contest shows a vitality and focus unfortunately lacking from earlier chapters. Janz (The Sorrows) fails to make this anything more than a clever idea. (Apr.)