C L Raven

Silent Dawn C L Raven

Longlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize and Flash 500 novel competition. Silent Dawn isn't real. She's a terrifying computer game character who erodes players' sanities. Just because her legend dates back to the 1600s, doesn't mean she's real. Just because people are vanishing, doesn't mean she's real. Just because she's standing in the corner... Reality is an illusion. Drake Skelton, Ben Crewe and Keira Black are seventeen-year-old outcasts. Their obsession with Silent Dawn: Asylum seems normal, until game features creep into their town: missing persons' posters, defaced patient records, the mutilated Victorian patient who hanged herself in the woods. Her madness infects you. As more people play the game, the veil between her reality and theirs is torn down until they can no longer trust their own minds. But this is real life. Computer game characters don't kidnap teenagers, or poison their minds with a siren song of suicide. Yet there's something...the flash of her red dress from the corners of their eyes. The shadow that creeps across their walls at night. The sinister humming that warns them they're not really alone... She's coming.