Dead On Arrival: The Survival Diaries of a Horrified Horror Writer

Okoh Promise Game

Twenty-one-year-old Lana Chen has written thirty horror stories, yet she’s terrified of everything. The irony isn’t lost on her. She writes about death because it’s the one monster she can control — on the page. But when she catches her boyfriend violating her sister on her own couch, storms out in blind fury, and gets obliterated by a car she never saw, death stops being metaphorical.Lana wakes up strapped to a decrepit, supernatural bus headed for an abandoned station that reeks of regret and sulfur. A hoarse voice crackles through the speakers: Welcome to The Survival Game. Hell is on recycle mode. One thought consumes her: Go to hell, Lex.Thrown into a nightmare she can’t write herself out of, Lana is hurled along with a busload of the recently deceased into a series of collapsing, haunted, lethal dimensions: dead worlds filled with monsters, traps, and horrors pulled from every corner of human mythology. Survive a world, earn points, move to the next. Die? You die for real. Permanently. And someone is watching, scoring their performance. High body count — especially creatively executed — comes with rewards.On the bus, Kael Voss, handsome and dangerously quiet, claims Lana like property. He’s been surviving longer than anyone, but he won’t explain why, won’t reveal the rules, the scars, or why his eyes linger on her like she’s both the most intriguing and dangerous thing alive. Then there’s Zaid Harrow — charming, brilliant, and deceitful — whose strategy is to make Lana fall for him first.Now Lana, self-proclaimed coward, must survive Dracula’s Castle, plague-ridden Victorian London, a drowned civilization, a cannibal ghost town, and eight other hellish landscapes, all while navigating desire, deceit, and deadly odds. The scariest story she’s ever lived? Her own.

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