What would make someone voluntarily enter a game where losing means being rendered unconscious and publicly humiliated?
Sometimes the answer is surprisingly ordinary.
Money.
In Dan Uselton’s dystopian thriller Rhea’s Game, contestants enter a televised competition for the chance to make a little extra cash. For some, the money could mean something as basic as keeping the electricity on through the winter.
Entering means accepting a game built around humiliation, with chloroform as the weapon of choice.
But the most disturbing part of Rhea’s Game may not be what contestants are willing to do for money.
It may be what millions of people are willing to watch.
An Awful Game People Choose to Play
The original rules of the competition were ugly.
Men and women faced one another, each trying to use chloroform to render the other unconscious. Once one contestant was unconscious, the winner stripped the loser naked and poured paint and honey over the loser’s body.
Cruel. Humiliating. Degrading.
But there were rules.
Then something changed.
Now there are no rules.
Once a contestant is unconscious, the boundaries that once defined what the winner could and could not do are gone.
Winning is no longer simply about avoiding humiliation. Losing means surrendering control of your unconscious body to another person without knowing what will happen next.
Removing the boundaries makes the spectacle more compelling. The contestants become increasingly desperate, and the viewers keep tuning in.
That leaves an uncomfortable question:
When viewers demand that every season go further than the last, who is responsible for what the game becomes—the people who created it, the contestants who participate, or the audience that refuses to look away?
The Opponent Is Never a Stranger
There is another cruelty built into Rhea’s Game.
The competition pits men against women, but the pairings aren’t random.
Contestants are deliberately matched with people connected to their pasts, turning old relationships and unresolved history into part of the competition. The more emotional the connection, the more personal and unpredictable the encounter becomes.
For Ryker Vale, that means confronting people tied to different parts of his life: an ex-teacher, the sister of the bully who once beat him badly enough to send him to the hospital, and others capable of reopening wounds he thought were behind him.
For Rhea Schwartz, the cruelty becomes even more personal.
After suffering her own humiliation, Rhea finds herself paired with the only boy she ever truly cared for.
Ryker.
Now they must decide what their shared past means when one of them is expected to leave the other unconscious and defenseless.
Their history makes the competition dangerous in an entirely different way.
When Suffering Becomes the Product
The people running the competition appear to possess all the power. They control the cameras, choose the contestants and pairings, and decide what the audience sees.
Yet the network’s power depends on something it cannot manufacture by itself: an audience willing to watch.
Once viewers become accustomed to one level of cruelty, keeping their attention requires something more. The network responds by pushing the humiliation further and stripping away boundaries.
The contestants know they’re being manipulated.
The audience may not realize it is participating too.
When the Players Turn on the Game
Eventually, surviving the next contest is no longer enough for Rhea.
She has been humiliated. She has seen how the network uses people’s histories against them. And she reaches a different conclusion:
Winning the game won’t stop the game.
She must decide how far she is willing to go to bring down the system itself.
Ryker is willing to help her.
Together, Rhea and Ryker turn their attention toward the network behind the spectacle and ultimately toward its CEO.
What follows is best left for readers to discover.
Critical and Reader Response
Rhea’s Game is an expanded edition of Uselton’s Chloroform Wars, with two additional chapters. The novel was also recognized as a Runner-Up at the Paris Book Festival.
OnlineBookClub called it “a dystopian action story filled with intensity and unpredictability” and “a reflection on spectacle, power, and resilience in a world stripped of morality.” MKZLiterartiste highlighted the “friendship and human endurance at the heart of a dystopian struggle.”
Readers have echoed those themes. One five-star Amazon reviewer praised the collision of “power, shame, and spectacle,” while another called the story “tense and disturbingly plausible” and said they “kept replaying the final choice.”
Who Really Controls the Game?
Uselton describes his intention more simply:
“If you feel uncomfortable while reading—good. That’s where the story lives.”
—Dan Uselton
The discomfort extends beyond what happens to the contestants. Rhea’s Game also turns its attention toward everyone who benefits from or consumes the spectacle.
The network profits.
The contestants suffer.
The audience watches.
Each can tell itself that someone else is responsible.
Perhaps that is what makes the premise uncomfortable. The world of Rhea’s Game doesn’t require millions of people to become monsters.
It only requires them to keep watching.
About Dan Uselton
Dan Uselton is an American author of psychological thrillers and speculative fiction whose stories frequently explore control, moral boundaries, and what ordinary people do when familiar rules disappear. His books include Rhea’s Game, My Twelve-Year-Old Wife, My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories, and the Memoirs of a Serial Killer series. His work has received recognition from the Literary Titan Book Awards, the American Writing Awards, and the Paris Book Festival.
Learn more about Rhea’s Game and Dan Uselton’s books at DanUseltonAuthor.com.
