God's Abandoned Shadows

In the grim port town of Thornhaven, the annual Carnival of Masks conceals a horrifying ritual where citizens, surrendering to a collective fugue, hunt and torture prisoners from the infamous Saltmire Penitentiary. Criminal profiler Elena Mercer, called to investigate a mutilated corpse discovered after the revelry, finds every psychological portrait she constructs of the killers reveals not individual monsters, but a shared, God-abandoned emptiness—a demonic awakening born from the town's generational complicity. As the next festival approaches, Elena must navigate a web of institutional silence and mass hysteria before the masks come off again, and the shadows left by God consume all.