Gods Perform: A dark progression fantasy about a cold, high-IQ male pr

Break a rule and you don't die. You stop ever having existed, and the whole room forgets you in the same breath. Adrian Vale wakes in a theater with no memory of how he got there. Three rules are printed on the playbill. He has spent twenty-seven years performing every emotion he's never actually felt, and he stays alive the way he does everything: by reading the room, the rules, and the things watching from the dark above, faster than they can use him. But the game has layers. Above the players, a handful who've climbed close enough to touch the rules. Above them, an audience that never steps out of the dark. And  at the very top, something that calls itself a god — and a promise that whoever reaches it gets to go home. The higher Adrian climbs, the less that promise holds up. And for all his cold, there's one thing he buried that won't stay buried. Fair-play to the bone, every clue on the page. You'll think you've read the room by chapter three. The room has been reading you since page one.