Atomic Coffin

De: Benedict Anning

Brought to you by Penguin.

December 1984. SIS field asset Heidi Sperling [codename Thistle] exfiltrates from East Berlin with the only copy of a critical intelligence coup – a naval log containing a solitary message received from a previously unidentified Soviet Typhoon ballistic missile nuclear submarine.

Incredulously – impossibly – it seems the vessel, known only as TK-15, has been sitting motionless and undetected in the waters between Scotland and Iceland for three years. Now NATO needs to be on high alert because that one-word message reads: ACTIVE . . .

Picked up from East Germany’s Baltic Coast by the Royal Navy’s hunter-killer submarine HMS Viking, Heidi is thrown into a mission to find and investigate the TK-15, and must confront her own paralytic fear of the ocean’s crushing black depths and HMS Viking’s seemingly hostile crew. When her only apparent ally, Executive Officer Daniel Vickers, disappears as they investigate the TK-15, she realises this modified submarine is far more than a Soviet experiment to gain a strategic upper hand in the nuclear arms race. Here, at the bottom of the ocean, the Soviets have – for good or ill – delved too long and too deep into what lies beneath and woken something far, far worse.
As Heidi’s own reality twists around her, as an unknowable force drives the crew to madness and cripples the British submarine's defences. Can Heidi control her own escalating fears and help bring the Soviet craft to the surface? Or will she make the ultimate sacrifice in order to stop the mysterious TK-15 from completing its dark and terrible mission?

© Benedict Anning 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Reseñas de la Crítica

If Philip K Dick and Stephen King had a lovechild at the height of Cold War tensions, it would look something like this. (NICHOLAS BINGE, bestselling author of Ascension)

This is a cracker! Creepy, claustrophobic and laced with dread, Atomic Coffin is a first-rate horror novel! (GARETH BROWN, bestselling author of The Book of Doors)

As if John Hornor Jacobs wrote The Hunt for Red October immediately after watching ‘Event Horizon’, Atomic Coffin is a complex cosmic puzzle of a debut, delivering Cold War spy-thriller pacing aboard a tense, claustrophobic submarine . . . and there’s something so much worse onboard. Fans of SA Barnes' space horror will love this gripping deep-sea adventure. (ALLY WILKES, acclaimed author of All the White Spaces)

A tense and claustrophobic horror novel that drips with atmosphere, tension and threat, Atomic Coffin is a Cold War fever dream of spies, submarines and intense, hull-cracking dread . . . a visceral and deeply menacing debut. (DAVID GOODMAN, award-winning author of A Reluctant Spy)

With a relentless, eerie rhythm that loops and builds to an otherworldly crescendo, Atomic Coffin is an unfathomably spooky deep-sea horror. (MK HARDY, author of the acclaimed The Needfire)

The Shining. In a nuclear submarine. On the edge of the continental shelf at the height of the Cold War, with occasional reference to cats. You can’t make this shit up. Fortunately, Benedict Anning can. And he does a damn good job of it.