24/7

Like Critchon on overdrive, Brown’s debut is a grabber—almost too much so.

The TV reality-game show here isn’t lethal at first, but it becomes so when a techno-suave terrorist hijacks it. Here, reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother are waning due to negative sentiment after a contestant’s suicide on a show called True Life. 24/7, however, is set to buck the trend. Over seven weeks, twelve contestants are to go through the usual trials and manipulations while stranded on a Caribbean island with just themselves, the crew, and over six hundred mostly hidden cameras—for a prize of two million. The show has barely started, though, when the entire production crew is struck dead by an Ebola-like virus. The contestants, meanwhile, are informed by a disembodied voice calling itself “Control” that they must still play the game (even though they’ve all been infected with the same virus) and that an online audience will vote each day as to which contestant won’t get the daily vaccine needed for survival. The network immediately pulls the show, but the signal is still there, showing up on the Internet and other networks even as the contestants begin to die off. All of this happens hardly more than 20 pages in. The atmosphere of sadism is palpable throughout (“The surf lashed the beach like a Roman flogging a Christian”), and the paper-thin characters hardly get their names out before they’re dispatched with grisly glee. Brown, though—an NBC broadcast journalist by trade—must be commended for not overloading his pages with an insider’s hyperdetailed accounts of the media circus that erupts.

An undeniably powerful plot-pull—albeit a ruthless, bludgeoning sort of thing that produces sickish laughter as much as anything else.