Quaid Loman wakes up in a room in a tropical resort. He has no memory how he got there and no idea where he is. Did he spectacularly fall off the wagon?

Then he finds out there’s 19 other people in the resort too. None of them know how they got there either though the gaps between now and their last memories vary. There’s no resort staff about and no clue where they are.

And they all receive letters with their own dated signatures on them. The letters state each of the nineteen is:

1) [character name] is a player in the Game.
2) The players must participate in the Game.
3) The players may agree to change the rules.
4)The players must obey the rules or forfeit.
5)The winner of the game is the last player who has not forfeited.

Being good Americans, a leader is nominated, and things are put to a vote when they all meet in the resort’s ballroom. And the process and decisions decided on are written up and distributed the next day to the players as rule addendums implying that the players are under surveillance by the forces running the Game.

There are questions. Can everyone be declared a winner and the game ended or must the Game be played out whatever the prize is or whatever is considered forfeiting?

Then the first body shows up.

The novel is Krane’s rumination on power dynamics – who leads and who follows and why – as the group divides into teams.

And what about those lights scene in the sky at night? And who’s running the Game? The CIA? The Chinese? Aliens? The Mafia?

Quaid is our main viewpoint character, but there’s also Berenice Greenblatt, a widow; Connie, a paranoid schizophrenic who has been institutionalized in the past and whose speculations begin to same increasingly reasonable; Carlos DeVay, an auto mechanic; and Abe Yanowitz, a doctor (convenient for autopsies).

When a team is sent to explore the rest of the island the social dynamics change when another dead person shows up, and Quaid finds himself imprisoned.

But he begins to sense that not all the players in the Game know its full rules and some of the players aren’t whom they claim. And some of the players start having shadowy memories about how they got to the island.

All the mysteries are resolved though Swiniarski again denies the reader what may have been a satisfying epilogue.

I’ve never read another book quite like this. The Game isn’t a version of Survivor, and it isn’t a version of Richard Connell’s classic “The Most Dangerous Game”. It may be Swiniarski’s shortest novel and pulls the reader along to the end.

In an introductory note, Krane tells us the Game is a “nefarious” version of a game called Nomic, introduced in Peter Suber’s The Paradox of Self-Amendment and popularized in Douglas Hofstader’s Metamagical Themas. ( )