One of the few books written by Marijane Meaker (one of the founders of Lesbian Pulp Fiction) under her real name, Game of Survival is a suspense novel about five strangers trapped in an elevator in a New York City hotel during a blizzard. Cut off from the rest of the world as people on the outside race to prevent the detached elevator from plummeting twenty stories, the trapped passengers attempt to pass the time and distract themselves by sharing stories from their past. As tempers and patience unravel, these five strangers learn more about themselves through what they share with one another... and what they don't.

What would normally be just another mini-disaster story takes on a whole new shape with the plot device of the elevator passengers sharing stories from their past, first about their experiences during the Northeast blackout of 1965 and then about their "worst mistakes." As a result, half of the action in the book takes place in flashbacks that reveal the backgrounds and motivations of the main characters. The flashbacks, which are presented as personal memories outside of the current time dialogue, are revealing not only by what they show and how the character views the flashback (hints of the unreliable narrator in most of the flashbacks), as well as by the revelation after each one of what part of the past event each character did not share in their version of the story. It's an interesting device that makes Game of Survival more of a character study then a rescue mission, and lends a greater level of depth than I originally suspected going in.

If there's one issue I've often had with novels featuring a group of strangers being trapped together in some unusual circumstance, it is that more often than not the author feels the need to make one of the characters a celebrity, and Meaker follows suit with including young football sensation T.T. Blades. Regardless of my bias, Booker's character didn't throw me off, and the obvious variety of the trapped characters covering the wide range of age and social (but not racial, interestingly enough) spectrum, while a bit suspect and convenient, didn't distract from my overall enjoyment of the story. This kind of menagerie of characters will also also leave the reader with a personal favorite, and mine is definitely the washed-up alcoholic womanizer Charles Latham (aka the unflappable Reverend Smoke).

What really saves the novel from mediocrity is not merely the depth of the characters, but the complexity of their tales and predicaments. While some authors always feel the need to wrap up all of the presented character flaws and dilemmas with neat solutions and happy endings, not much is resolved for these characters at the end, and in some cases what is seen as a positive step forward by the character might even be construed as a step backward or in the wrong direction altogether. The reader gains an insight into the characters not just by what they reveal the reader, but by what they don't reveal to the others and themselves, and invariably finds that they are invested in what becomes of them. While the titular "game of survival" is the storytelling that the elevator passengers engage in, it is also the game they play as they struggle - each in their own way, with their own inherent self-destructive qualities - to survive the lives they have built for themselves, and the choices they make in the process. ( )