When the lights go out, the lottery begins.
Not everyone in Mercer Quarter is meant to survive.
A sudden blackout traps Janine Hodge, her students, and a handful of desperate adults inside Carver Middle School. At first, it looks like a citywide emergency. Power is gone. Phones are dead. Roads are blocked. The official broadcasts promise order, aid, and evacuation.
Then the screen starts asking for names.
Food arrives only after obedience. Medical help comes with conditions. Every choice inside the shelter is watched, measured, and rewarded by unseen people who treat survival like entertainment.
Janine only wanted to keep her students alive. Now she has to outthink a system built to break them.
As fear spreads through the shelter, supplies vanish, trust collapses, and the children begin to understand the truth before most of the adults will admit it: the blackout isn’t a disaster.
It’s a selection.
And somewhere beyond the locked doors, powerful people are deciding who gets rescued, who gets sacrificed, and who becomes proof that the experiment worked.
The Blackout Lottery is a tense science-horror thriller about survival, coercion, and the terrifying moment ordinary people realize the emergency was planned.
Perfect for readers who want:
A high-stakes survival thriller with relentless tensionA chilling near-future conspiracy built around social controlA locked-down school setting filled with moral pressureOrdinary characters forced into impossible choicesA science-horror edge without losing human emotionA first book that delivers a complete crisis while opening a larger trilogyWhen rescue becomes a trap, Janine has one job left:
Keep the children from becoming numbers.
