Panic: Ghosts and Legends

A Novella

De: Lauren Oliver

Narrado por: Camron Jones, Ray Nicholson, Olivia Welch

Before Panic was our game, it was our secret. Before that, just a rumor. And before that? A ghost story. Listen close - but don’t believe everything you hear.

Panic is a legendary game played by graduating seniors in the middle-of-nowhere town of Carp, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher: After a series of challenges ranging from sleeping in a haunted house to running across a highway blindfolded, one winner takes home a cash prize in the tens of thousands at the end of the summer. Participating players are sworn to secrecy, which means little is known of Panic’s history. Until now.

Each of these three stories follows a former player connected to one of the game’s lingering mysteries - a ghost of Panic past, a legend. In this spellbinding novella, you’ll meet the quiet, unassuming kid who may have started it all; the golden boy who’d do anything to win; and the underestimated cheerleader who brought decades of family history into this dangerous game.

Panic: Ghosts and Legends is set in the world of the Amazon Original series Panic, available only on Amazon Prime Video.

©2021 Laura Schechter (P)2021 Audible Originals, LLC.

Not what I was expecting

This was unexpected, but really good actually. Take a chance on it. It’s free and only a few hours long.

Abrupt ending

An interesting book with a good storyline. The use of different narrators Was a good choice. I am left feeling as though there’s something missing as the story abruptly ends with no real build up.

peacan rant

Story was good, performance was vexing. Story takes place in Texas. There people say "PAA-CON", the performers kept used the Northern USA enunciation "PEE-CAN'.

It drove me nuts that they got that detail wrong.

It’s coo

The last story was boring but the other two were fine. Maybe I’ll watch the movie idk

Intriguing story and mood

I enjoyed the writing and format. Every sentence felt meaningful. I really liked the first narrator and first part the most. Intriguing story and eerie mood overall.

ghosts and legends

Like an old folk lore gone wild. The last few haunting lines says it all.

enjoyed this. a fun young adult listen

good storyline. kept me listening. I really enjoyed this and even though I may not have been the targeted audience I still enjoyed alot.

eh....

it was OK.

3 short stories reminiscent of tales from the crypt, surrounding different years of graduating seniors of a podunk h.s.

they gamble on their lives because they are bored, wonder tales all.

loved

the myths that Oliver has created to supplement her story are spooky and well thought out.

Confused story, reader meh

My wife and I listened to this story... and we had the same opinion. There were problems with the story in that the scenes were not well described. The main reader of the first part... proved that reading a story well is a skill that is not simple acting.. many times he seemed to be chewing his words, especially early in the performance. Well, this once again proves that reading is a skill and a performance like this makes me appreciate the more expert readers even more.

We found ourselves constantly confused by the story. We would listen to chapters repeatedly trying to guess the meaning, then we would stop the book and guess what the meaning or point of this chapter was. This made listening to the book take much longer than the listed time. In one scene, the drunken pawnshop owner has a sawed-off shotgun, then he has a rifle. Is this on purpose? Just bad writing? A writer who doesn't know the difference? Did the pawnshop owner actually have a sawed-off shotgun (which would require an ATF stamp) and did he maybe hide it before the sheriff got there? Did he never have the sawed-off because that was an imaginary scene because of some shenanigans I won't explain because it is a spoiler?

And why the heck would someone customize a Browning High-Power, which is kind of a meh 9mm handgun in the first place? I again wondered if it had some significance or if the writer was just ignorant about guns and presumed that everyone was, and thought that the name of the pistol was neat.

I guess it comes down to this: If you want to listen to this as a way to set the stage to watch the series on prime, ok. But if the series is as muddy as this novella was to me, I probably won't watch the whole thing. I don't think that this novella is worth listening to unless you intend to watch the series. It is too jumbled, muddy, and hard to follow. Things, intentionally, are not resolved. All that I got out of it was issue after issue that couldn't be.

In one of the sections of the book, someone is buried in a coffin for eight hours. They are given a "tank of oxygen" and some sort of mask.

The tank was carried by one person for a fairly long distance. So it could not possibly have been big enough to supply one person's breathing needs for eight hours.

I will try to explain.

First off, you don't breathe oxygen, you breathe air. Breathing 100% oxygen will damage your lungs if you do it for a long time. In any case, you need a volume of gas that will allow you to flush the CO2 out of your body and lungs. No matter what the partial pressure of oxygen is, the CO2 has to come out. So you don't carry a smaller tank just because it is oxygen rather than air.

Divers sometimes use a device called a "Rebreather", which works by using a chemical that will absorb the CO2, then the volume lost is made up with oxygen (modern ones use a diluent gas, nitrogen, helium, or air because it is 80% Nitrogen, and cheap but I am trying to talk basics) and that allows you to go for a long time on a little O2 but high school kids won't have such a thing. It is a complex device.

So, the coffin needs a vent and ventilation. Suppose the person in the coffin has a tank of air. A scuba tank, or a fireman's SCBA tank, is good for a half-hour to an hour. On the surface, resting calmly, meditating and controlling your breathing, one might get two hours. That would be stretching it.

So a normal SCUBA tank is 80 cubic feet of air. A relaxed person's breathing tidal volume might be two liters, and they might breathe every six seconds, so 12 liters per minute, or 720 liters per hour. I expect that the real numbers for someone would be much higher. This is about three hours. In my experience, an experienced driver who is trying to conserve their air would get about half that amount of time.

You might argue that someone who is carrying an oxygen tank around because they have, say, emphysema, can get 12 hours from a small tank that would fit into a coffin, but that is because they are just using a small amount of oxygen to enrich the air, and they have plenty of air around to flush out the CO2.

If you provide enough gas for the person to breathe just the gas without breathing in their exhalations, you would need at least three 80 cubic foot air tanks, and realistically six. No room in the coffin for all that. It does not matter whether you give them pure oxygen or not, the volume of gas is needed to flush the CO2. If you try to just give them enough oxygen to enrich the air, they will die from carbon dioxide poisoning.

Exhaled air is 4‰ CO2, and 16‰ oxygen. Your exhaled CO2 will build up in a sealed coffin. Air will leak out, of course, but you need a lot of gas to push out out exhaled gas, or you need something to absorb the CO2.

My point is that one person could not have carried the tanks needed to maintain a person for eight hours without a dolly or a wheelbarrow. And cracking a tank of gas to release the pressure in it makes a lot of noise, and if you crack it just a little so that you get a barely audible hiss, then you don't release much gas.

Then you have to manifold six high-pressure (3000 psi) tanks together, and you don't do that with stuff you get at the hardware store.

One person can't carry the stuff, and if you put it in the coffin you have no room for the player.

I guess I feel like the writer was writing about things that they knew nothing about and, rather than consulting someone who knew something about physics and physiology, just made stuff up. The gun stuff, the burial were so bad as to be jarring. Anything about physics was just as likely to be wrong or impossible, as it was to be right.

And all they needed was two vents, one intake, one outflow, and a battery-operated fan, or a bellows to get air into the coffin, and to let the exhalations out.