The violent bond created between two serial killers and sexual offenders and their victim, becoming a dysfunctional family bond, and the familiar life of this family over three generations. The nature and nurture as causes of violent behaviour.
The Game of Fear is a disturbing psychological thriller that explores the origins, manifestation, and heredity of absolute evil over three generations of a family bound by blood ties, violence, trauma, and an obscure loyalty.
The work unfolds as a family tragedy - in this case, several macabre tragedies and creates a narrative arc whose premise establishes evil not as an external entity, but as a hereditary disease, a pattern of behaviour taught and learned that perpetuates through time.
The text values the omniscient narrator’s testimony, which penetrates the characters’ minds and describes both acts of extreme violence and moments of affection with detachment, creating an atmosphere of fatalism, as if we were observing an experimenter of the unfolding of a curse. The language is direct, which increases the impact of the scenes.
The structure guides the reader through the successive lineages clearly, with the parts related to the characters (and their respective dynamics), bringing the reader closer to each of them, as well as to the development of their distorted and peculiar family ties, adding complexity and nuance to the plot, even in its monstrosity.
The rhythm is driven by acts of violence and twists, maintaining its narrative momentum in a constant state of tension and coherence in the darkness of its fictional universe, where bestiality is the standard language and love is a form of imprisonment.
This book is Ana Folhadela's Dark Collection Book 1, a collection that focuses on different approaches to these themes. Was originally written in Portuguese, titled “O JOGO DO MEDO”.