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Atomic Coffin
  • Published: 25 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529970111
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:

Atomic Coffin

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
13 Oct 2026
Hardback
25 July 2026
EBook
25 June 2026
Audiobook
25 June 2026
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Set in the bowels of a nuclear submarine during the final decade of the first Cold War, a terrifying, mind-expanding, skin-crawling cosmic horror that reads like the literary lovechild of The Hunt for Red October and ‘Event Horizon’ . . .

December 1984. SIS field asset Heidi Sperling [codename Thistle] exfiltrates from East Berlin with the only copy of a critical intelligence coup – a Soviet naval log containing a solitary message received from a previously unidentified 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 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?
  • Published: 25 June 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529970111
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
Categories:

About the author

Benedict Anning

Benedict Anning is a Surrey-born author and short fiction writer living just outside of Edinburgh with his wonderful cat, Penny. After a stint in creative studies at sixth form, independent exams, and later Ancient History at university, Ben spent three years as a bookseller before moving to the third sector where he now works for a local animal shelter. An artist at heart and fan of all things eerie, Ben has a special love for twisty horror fiction where the setting is a principal character and things just aren't quite right. Atomic Coffin is his first published novel.
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Praise for Atomic Coffin

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.

PETER WATTS, author of Blindsight