Blog Archives
Control Versus Agency
Rhea’s Game follows two teenagers who are trapped inside a televised survival system where obedience is rewarded, resistance is punished, and humiliation is broadcast as entertainment. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The idea grew out of watching how entertainment, social media, and economic pressure increasingly blur together. I wanted to explore what happens when survival itself becomes content—when people are rewarded for compliance and punished publicly for resistance. The game format let me push that to its logical extreme and ask what choice really means inside a system designed to control outcomes.
Do you see the system in the book as exaggerated fiction—or an extension of real structures we already live with?
It’s an extension. The world in Rhea’s Game is heightened, but the mechanics are familiar: surveillance, performative success, and invisible rules that favor those already in power. The story just removes the polite language and shows the machinery underneath.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Control versus agency. Identity under pressure. How systems convince people to participate in their own confinement. I was also interested in quiet resistance—the small, human choices that don’t look heroic but still matter when everything else is stacked against you.
What is the next book you’re working on, and when can fans expect it?
I’m currently working on Book 2 of Rhea’s Game, alongside the sequel to Memoirs of a Serial Killer. I also have My Twelve-Year-Old Wife launching in just a few days. New releases are planned throughout 2026 as I continue expanding these interconnected psychological thriller worlds.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Previously published as Chloroform Wars — Runner-Up (Wild Card), Paris Book Festival. Revised edition with two additional chapters.
They don’t execute rebels anymore — they broadcast them.
The cameras never blink. The audience never looks away.
In a near-future America, teenagers are forced into televised survival competitions where obedience is rewarded and resistance is punished publicly. Winning doesn’t mean freedom. It means staying useful to the audience. Losing doesn’t mean death — it means humiliation, punishment, and erasure, all in front of millions.
Rhea Schwartz has spent her whole life being ignored. Now the system has finally noticed her — and it wants her broken for entertainment.
Ryker Vale signed up for the program for one reason: money. He never expected to become trapped inside a machine built to control people through spectacle.
Matched against each other and broadcast nationwide, Rhea and Ryker face a brutal choice: play the roles they’re assigned… or turn the show into a rebellion the whole country can’t ignore.
Dark, brutal, and uncomfortably plausible, Rhea’s Game is a dystopian psychological survival thriller about power, surveillance, and what happens when suffering becomes entertainment.
Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and Black Mirror.
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife: Erased Memories drops the reader straight into a world where time folds, grief bites hard, and reality keeps shifting under the characters’ feet. The book follows Dan, a man who loses his wife brutally, then hurls himself backward through time to save her. He lands in 2003 and discovers a teenage version of Celia, a younger and sharper incarnation of the woman he loved, and a chilling truth about Lang, the man who killed her. As Dan struggles to protect her, time glitches, memories warp, and past and future versions of Lang collide. The story moves fast, and the stakes sit right at the throat from the opening chapter.
I kept feeling the tension coil in my chest whenever Dan slipped between timelines. His heartbreak is loud. His fear is louder. I found myself rooting for him even when he made choices that scared me. The writing surprised me with small, quiet moments tucked between scenes of dread. A breakfast. A joke. A breath of calm before the ground cracked open. They made the danger feel personal instead of mechanical, and I loved that steady tug between ordinary life and cosmic consequences. There were times when the dialogue carried more weight than the action itself, and those were the moments that resonated with me.
Time travel is usually all rules and logic, but here it felt messy and emotional, which I liked. Time behaves like a living thing. It twitches when Dan pushes it. It punishes him when he presses too hard. I also appreciated how the author handled trauma. Nothing is graphic, but the emotional fallout hit real. Celia’s distrust, Dan’s guilt, the thin places in the world that react to their fear, all of it landed with a strange mix of warmth and dread. I kept forgetting to breathe during the scenes under the bleachers, especially when the masked figure flickered in and out of sight. The writing there felt sharp and cold in the best way.
I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy psychological thrillers with a strong emotional core, and to anyone who likes their time travel tangled with heartbreak instead of gadgets. If you want a story that creeps under your skin and sits there long after the last page, this is a good one. Author Dan Uselton turns time itself into a monster, and the result is unforgettable.
Pages: 323 | ASIN : B0G2FLTQSP
Rhea’s Game: A Psychological Survival Thriller
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.
Pages: 268 | ASIN : B0G7VWM8QN
How Identity Survives
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife follows a desperate man searching for his missing wife, who has a twelve-year-old girl with his wife’s memories show up at his door, claiming to be her. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The initial spark came from a simple, unsettling question: What if the person you love most disappears… and then returns as a child, still believing they are your wife? That idea gripped me because it collides love, memory, morality, and time in a way that instantly creates emotional and ethical tension. I wasn’t interested in explaining it with heavy science fiction rules. I wanted to explore how far love stretches, where it breaks, and how identity survives when reality bends. The premise let me push a psychological and emotional boundary in a very human way.
Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the characters in the novel?
For the most part, yes. Dan and Celia evolved as I wrote them. They stopped being just “characters” and started behaving like people with real trauma, confusion, loyalty, and fear. What surprised me most was how much restraint I actually had to show—what they don’t say or do often carries more power than what they do. There are still layers I’m continuing to explore more deeply in Book Two, but I feel I created honest, flawed, believable people in an impossible situation.
When you first sat down to write this story, did you know where you were going, or did the twists come as you were writing?
I had a few major anchor points in mind, but the story very much revealed itself as I wrote it. Certain scenes appeared suddenly in my head, sometimes late at night, and demanded to be written. The twists weren’t plotted on a board — they came from asking myself, “What is the most emotionally honest (and disturbing) thing that could happen next?” In many ways, the story surprised me while I was writing it.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m in the middle of an intense release window and will be launching three books within the next several months. The first is My Twelve-Year-Old Wife 2: Erased Memories, which expands the timeline fracture and deepens the emotional and psychological consequences introduced in the first novel. The second is Memoirs of a Serial Killer: Book Two, continuing the disturbing and introspective descent of the series. The final release is a reimagined and expanded edition of Chloroform Wars, retitled Rhea’s Game — which was a runner-up at the Paris Book Festival — now featuring several additional chapters and a sharper focus on Rhea’s perspective within the dystopian world.
Together, the three books continue to explore identity, power, memory, and moral collapse in different but interconnected ways.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
By morning, a twelve-year-old girl stood on his porch — carrying his wife’s memories.
Finalist — 2025 American Writing Awards (Fiction, Psychological)
From Dan Uselton, author of Chloroform War — Runner-Up (Wild Card), Paris Book Festival
Updated Edition – November 2025: Revised timelines, refined pacing, and new author edits for the most immersive reading experience yet.
Dan Fox can’t explain it. The girl knows intimate details from his marriage—things no one else could possibly know. She remembers everything.
As Dan hunts for answers, he’s dragged into a twisting psychological nightmare where memory and identity fracture and:
A masked predator stalks them through shifting realities
Every revelation spirals into deeper deception
One impossible choice could erase the woman he loves forever
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife is a dark psychological thriller about grief, devotion, and the terrifying grip of the past. Fans of The Silent Patient, Verity, Gone Girl, and Behind Her Eyes will be hooked until the final page.
My Twelve-Year-Old Wife
My Twelve-Year Old Wife is a dark, time-bending thriller about love, grief, and the unrelenting pull of fate. It follows Dan Fox, a husband desperate to find his missing wife, Celia, only to have a twelve-year-old girl appear at his door claiming to be her. What begins as a mystery about disappearance spirals into something stranger, a story that slips between timelines and emotions, showing how trauma, memory, and devotion can warp across the years. The book plays with horror and science fiction but stays grounded in its aching humanity. Each chapter peels back another layer of the impossible, until the reader is as disoriented and haunted as Dan himself.
The writing is cinematic and unnerving, full of tight, fast sentences and moments that hit like a punch. I could feel Dan’s confusion and fear, his disbelief when he’s confronted with a version of his wife that shouldn’t exist. The story toys with logic but never loses its emotional truth. The prose has this eerie stillness, a rhythm that feels like breathing in the dark, and the pacing moves between slow dread and heart-hammering tension. I caught myself whispering “what?” out loud more than once, which almost never happens when I read. The author’s control over mood and momentum is impressive. Even when scenes leaned into the surreal, the characters kept me anchored.
But what hit me hardest wasn’t the time travel or the mystery, it was the loneliness. Beneath the weirdness, this is a love story about guilt and obsession. Dan’s desperation feels raw and a little ugly, and Celia’s time-fractured existence is both tragic and strange. Their connection stretches and twists, but it never breaks. I could sense how much the author wanted to explore what happens when love is stronger than reality itself. At times, the dialogue can feel blunt, but it works here, it fits people who are terrified and grasping for sense in the middle of madness.
My Twelve-Year Old Wife is for readers who like their stories unsettling, who don’t mind questioning what’s real and what’s imagined. If you liked Dark, Arrival, or The Time Traveler’s Wife but wished they were more psychological and eerie, this book is for you. It’s weird, bold, and relatable.
Pages: 194 | ASIN : B0FD87Y85R
