First Contact Horror

Somewhere in Russia… Boris Petrov in his glory days had a career in the Russian secret service but now he is well past his prime and just a bored police officer. Annoyed by obnoxious colleagues and petty crimes he languishes in his filthy office. An emergency call changes everything. He is the only available officer and he reluctantly takes up the case. He locates the origin of the emergency call by EMMA in the middle of nowhere. He is greeted by an obscure professor in a secretive building full with high-tech equipment and the darkest secret he could never have imagined even in his ...

Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020!"A terrifying tour de force." --James Rollins"Readers will be riveted." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Sally Jansen was NASA's leading astronaut, until a mission to Mars ended in disaster. Haunted by her failure, she lives in quiet anonymity...

For Flight Engineer Cynthia Han and her fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 81 has proved as mundane as space travel ever gets. Yes, this would be Cynthia’s final NASA mission, for reasons she has so far kept from the rest of the crew; and yes, the latest billionaire “space tourist” has managed to irritate everyone on board. Still, none of them could have asked for a smoother experience. Until the morning they wake up to silence. All communication with Earth, gone.

Alien visitors devastate a remote farm in Lovecraft’s first and best venture into science fiction.

When Earth went silent, humanity did not die cleanly. It changed. In the ruins of orbit, a salvage crew boards a dead nursery station and finds the descendants of children abandoned in the dark. On a starving colony world, a buried alien signal begins repairing machines, organs, and broken bodies—but every miracle asks what must be surrendered in return. Beneath the red dust of Rath-9, a recovery team sent to certify a failed settlement discovers a living colony the company would rather erase than recognize. After Earth Went Silent collects three dark science fiction horror stories: The ...

The entire human race balances on the razor's edge of annihilation, beset by an enemy that turns our own bodies against us, that changes normal people into psychopaths or transforms them into nightmares. To some, Doctor Margaret Montoya is a hero-a brilliant scientist who saved the human race from an alien intelligence determined to exterminate all of humanity. To others, she's a monster - a mass murderer single-handedly responsible for the worst atrocity ever to take place on American soil. All Margaret knows is that she's broken. The blood of a million deaths is on her hands.

100,000 years ago the object hit the lake at the deepest point, quickly sinking into its mile-deep Stygian darkness. The sheets of ice closed, time moved on and the land forgot. But over the centuries, legends grew of people vanishing, of strange, deformed animals and of an unexplained luminescence down in the lake depths. When Marcus Stenson won the lucrative contract to create a sturgeon fish farm on the site of disused paper mill on the shore of Lake Baikal, he thought he had won the lottery and refused to listen to the chilling folktales....

No longer bound to Earth or the Core Sol System, the human race has expanded into the far beyond, seeding itself throughout the final frontier. It has been a time of great expansion, hope, and progress. These remote colonies, some found at the fringes of the Outer Rim, rely on supplies brought to them by deep-space commercial shipping vessels, which transport the needed goods and commodities to keep humanity alive and thriving in the most remote and austere locations.

It arrives without warning. A ghost in the machine, an impossible object moving inward from the edge of the solar system with terrifying purpose. At first, it is a scientific curiosity. Then, a global threat. When astronomers realize the object is not an asteroid but a guided ship, humanity has one chance to defend itself. Project Atlas: a planet-wide railgun network, the pinnacle of human ingenuity and our last and only hope. The world holds its breath as the cannons fire. And for six hours, they celebrate a victory. But the object is not so easily defeated. When the dust settles, the ...

The Fourth of July in Red Hollow is a celebration of heat, noise, and tradition. But this year, the celebration is just camouflage. Photographer Owen sees it first—a glitch in his camera showing a man's smile stretching into an impossible, grotesque crescent . Hot dog vendor Al serves the same blank-faced man the same exact order twice in ten minutes, a film skipping on repeat . Then, in front of the entire town, Mayor Thompson collapses during his speech, only to rise again—unnaturally smooth, his eyes glassy, and wearing a perfect, hollow smile . When a silent, pristine ambulance ...

An alien experiment gets loose and turns an unsuspecting woman into a creature of passion and goo. While one researcher works to understand this new creature, it has seductive plans of its own.

Some discoveries destroy you. Some pleasures enslave you. Some first contacts are humanity's last mistake. Commander Jessa Reyne has dreamed of this moment her entire career—first contact with an alien species. When the Keeper arrives at Research Station Kepler-442b requesting cultural exchange, she's honored to be humanity's representative. The Keeper is beautiful. Elegant. Its translator introduces it as Keeper-of-Stories-Who-Swims-Between-Stars—a collector of knowledge, a scholar of cultures, seeking peaceful exchange. It's all a lie, and Jessa is doomed. Content Warning: EXTREMELY ...

We were not created by accident. We were engineered. When a mysterious signal from deep space matches a hidden pattern in human DNA, astrophysicist Dr. Mara Voss uncovers a truth older than civilization — and far more dangerous. Humanity was designed by the Architects, god-like beings who abandoned their experiment… until now. As the signal awakens across the globe, machines begin to think, minds begin to fracture, and Earth itself starts to rewrite its own code. To stop the transformation, Mara must confront the one secret she swore she’d never face — the father she lost, now ...

She wakes up alone. Adrift. With no memory of how she got there. All Dr. Dana Cruz knows is the endless, predatory blue of the ocean and the pain from a blow to her head. Her specialized diving suit has been sabotaged . The wreckage of her flotation pod has been stripped of supplies . This was not an accident. It was an execution. But she is not the only thing in the water. Something is moving in the crushing darkness below, an entity large enough to be an island, powerful enough to defy physics. It tracks her every move, its intentions unknown. As fragments of her memory return, Dana ...

A gravitational anomaly beyond Neptune. No radiation. No propulsion signature. No reason to exist. When deep-space instruments detect an object that defies every law of physics, Commander Elena Markovic and theoretical physicist Dr. Kaito Suresh are dispatched aboard the vessel Aegis to intercept it before it reaches Earth orbit. What they find is not an invasion force. It’s something far stranger. The object doesn’t travel through space. It rewrites space, altering the fundamental constants of physics around itself, converting vacuum energy as a mode of transportation. As the Aegis ...

EDITORIAL REVIEW WHEN THEY CAME is a chilling invasion novel that rejects spectacle in favor of something far more disturbing: quiet, precise destruction followed by absolute control. As humanity struggles to understand what has been lost, the story explores the terrifying cost of comfort, obedience, and survival after first contact. Unsettling, intelligent, and deeply human, this is invasion horror that lingers long after the final page. WHEN THEY CAME Survival Was No Longer a Choice EVENT STATUS: ONGOING CLASSIFICATION: RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION: LIMITED Anomalous activity detected across ...

It's supposed to be a simple job, a look-see operation to make sure something terrible hasn't happened. The leader is prone to fits of violence, and there are rumors of previous human rights abuses. Only, when they arrive, the ship is...empty. The question is - where did everybody go? Armed only with riot gear, they explore the ship, intent on discovering the truth about what's happened on The Ark. What they find will be more nightmarish than anything they've seen before. Indeed, it's worse than anything they could imagine.

Editorial Review The Far Side is a restrained, devastating work of documented horror that transforms decades of lunar anomalies, canceled Apollo missions, and whispered cover-ups into something far more unsettling than conspiracy: consequence. Told with clinical precision and quiet humanity, the novel follows what happens when a system designed to erase evidence fails to erase a person. Ted Lazaris refuses spectacle or explanation, delivering literal, on-page terror through bodily harm, memory loss, and irreversible human cost. The result is a chilling, cinematic record that lingers not ...

Wilderness guide Jonah Keller just wants a quiet holiday with his estranged daughter. But when a perfect, vertical tear unzips the sky over Mirror Shard Lake, he witnesses an event that defies physics and logic. The anomaly is just the beginning. When his daughter, Jessica, arrives, she’s tormented by a high-frequency sound only she can hear—a signal coming from the remote Black Elk Ridge. As hikers vanish from the trails and locals are found with their memories wiped and their fingerprints erased, Jonah uncovers a terrifying truth. This isn’t an invasion. It’s a “correction.” A...

THEY DIDN'T JUST INVADE. THEY BEGAN TO HARVEST. Ten years ago, the Kharlans arrived. Human ingenuity and nuclear arsenals proved useless against their biological-technological hybrid armor. Major cities fell in days as the invaders turned the entire planet into a buffet—systematically harvesting human bodies for a purpose more terrifying than mere extinction. Lieutenant Carlson is a survivor, a pilot flying a patchwork armada of retrofitted F-16s—relics of a dead world held together by stolen technology and desperate hope. Stationed on the orbiting carrier Forrestal, he spends his mid-...