A horror novel that fans of “Camp Damascus,” “Maeve Fly,” and “Final Girls Support Group” will love to dread.

After Joanna Hunter leaves her fiance at the altar, her parents send her to an intensive program for failing adults. Bronwenn School for Insomniacs isn’t like any normal college. Its attendees move zombie-like through simulated life scenarios, pretending to date, work, and socialize in an unreal New York City. It’s not safe to walk the halls during class. There’s nowhere to escape. And an unseen audience laughs at their every move.

Joanna and five friends must obey Bronwenn’s unwritten rules or risk punishment that turns the liminal hallways into a nightmare hellscape. They’ll be mutilated if they fail to comply. But the price for conformity is their entire lives.

Joanna Hunter

Cheerleader-turned-trophy wife on the run after leaving her fiancé at the altar. No employment history. Trust fund maturing in five years. Enrollment initiated by parents.

Gale Geldern

Fat camp success story who graduated culinary school with a twenty-four inch waist. Familial assets in real estate. Known for one-night-stands. Voluntary self-enrollment.

Michele Brunch

Orphaned as child; homeless through adolescent years. Three convictions for homicide. Loves Reiki and chakras; enrolled voluntarily, twice.

Charles Cherry

Cynical nihilist with homosexual tendencies. Knows how to use Microsoft Windows 98. Paid bribe to guarantee enrollment.

Vinnie Russo

Former pornography actor interested in developing craft for stage and screen. Pays tuition by performing in scenarios. NOTE: Student’s whereabouts are confidential.

Adam Geldern

Psychiatry doctorate who fell short of Success due to girlfriend’s lesbian lover. Seeking opportunities for personal growth. Complicit in education.

An hour after she fell asleep, Joanna’s face cream was still setting, so her cheeks/chin/forehead glistened damply around the protective velvet domes of her sleep mask. The timer on her TV had yet to switch from ocean sounds to silent black. She was still holding her Walkman over her heart, its cable leading to headphones on a bedside table scattered with makeup. The bed’s canopy was lined with fairy lights that glowed dimly blue at night. Her slippers, the fluffy kind, were aligned at the foot of her bed, waiting for her morning routine.

The men unlocked her bedroom door using a copy of her key, which Joanna’s father had given them. They had made it all the way to the third floor of the Hunter family house, where the princess herself slept, without setting off a single alarm. Ocean sounds masked the creaking of the floorboards, the heavy panting breaths behind black masks. A fan oscillated on her desk. Its motor hummed over Gunnar’s leather gloves groaning with every flex of his fingers.

For a moment Gunnar admired her: the eldest daughter of the Hunter family, the most beautiful of the three, the most exquisitely feminine. He marveled at how fresh she was now, coddled in her bed. He wondered how any angel could have fallen as far as Joanna Hunter must have in order for Gunnar to end up with her school picture in his wallet. The picture was from her high school senior year. According to the files, she was six years older now. She didn’t look it.

“Now,” he murmured. “Get her now.”

The men closed in on Joanna. Their goal was to lift her head and cover it with a bag before she could see anyone. But as soon as she woke, she thrashed. A fighter. A lot of them started out fighting.

“What are you doing? No! Daddy! Help!”

Gunnar got the bag over her head. He flipped Joanna onto her bed face first, pressing his weight against her back. He bound her wrists with bungee cables. The small ones with red stripes. They weren’t so harsh binding her delicate bones. Joanna was so thin, she could barely shift her weight under Gunnar’s.

“Got her?” asked Pete, a wider man with more hair.

“Got her,” said Gunnar.

Joanna screamed all the way to the van.

She had no idea that her parents watched her getting loaded into the van with drawn ex-pressions. They clutched one another in total silence. Her mother was about to faint, wilting against the confident iron pillar of her husband for support. Joanna’s Daddy was surer than ever that this was right, that this was exactly what Joanna needed, and that by the end, she would thank him for it.

The van was gray with rust marks pocking the sides. There was no carpet in the back, so when Joanna was shoved down between the wheel wells, her bare skin met cold metal. There was a lot of bare skin. She slept in a matching nightie set with shorts and spaghetti straps. It was the last non-prescribed outfit she could wear until she graduated. It was not enough protection.

She cried the entire long drive, beginning on the well-maintained roads surrounding the Hamptons home. It felt too rough. The van’s suspension was shot. Every time the van bounced, Joanna bounced, and her skeletal-slender angles bruised against the cold ridged floors. The roads got worse when they came out of the mountains and kept going west. Pavement turned to gravel. As she popcorned helplessly in the back of the van, Joanna wept for help from someone, anyone, and her voice had become so pathetically hoarse after all the crying that Gunnar wished he could give her what she wanted. She was small for a gal in her early twenties. Tight little body. Tiny little waist. The slit in the side of her shorts riding up high on her hip made her little legs look long. He was already in love.

They took one bathroom break, opening the door to haul Joanna out to a chilly environment she could not see. They left the bag over her head while she pissed, her arms held high by Gunnar, so she was forced to hang from his hands while the urine dripped. Joanna started crying again.

Then she slept, collapsed in the back of the van. They always slept eventually.

Gunnar woke Joanna up later. “We’re getting close.”

“Close to where? What’s going on?” she asked. “Somebody needs to give me answers!”

Nobody needed to give Joanna anything. She had legally received full disclosure of this process through her father, her guardian, and consented to every painful moment in the van. And when they whipped the bag off her head, when searing daylight turned the world into floating neon-green blobs, when her knees hit the dusty ground, it was already within the perimeter of Bronwenn School for Insomniacs, where Joanna would remain for the next ten years.