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, author of Ascension

This is a cracker! Creepy, claustrophobic and laced with dread, Atomic Coffin is a first-rate horror novel!

GARETH BROWN, 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, 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, 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 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

Awash with crushing terror and claustrophobia, and the dread of physical and psychological isolation, Atomic Coffin is an excellent high-pressure tale of cosmic horror.

TIM LEBBON, author of Secret Lives of The Dead

Claustrophobia-inducing . . . Atomic Coffin feels like an underwater version of Event Horizon, with a little bit of Solaris mixed in . . . a sunken treasure chest of delights.

SFX

Combines a cold war spy novel with lurking horrors beneath the sea . . . a creepy, disorientating journey into fear.

Lisa Tuttle, GUARDIAN

Things don’t get much darker than the depths of the north Atlantic, where most of the action in Benedict Anning’s impressive debut effort, Atomic Coffin takes place.... The icy claustrophobia of the deep-sea setting and the sense of a paranoid world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon are strongly conveyed.

Financial Times

This is a first-rate work...it has pace and ideas, genre thrills combined with philosophical questions.

The Scotsman

Brilliantly original must-read horror. Anning has fused a claustrophobic submarine-set Cold War thriller with a genuinely terrifying Event Horizon-style nightmare, and the result is tonally terrific, a nightmarish descent which will have you clinging to your armchair every single fathom.

GrimDark

Anning’s ability to create an unusual protagonist and a well-realised mise-en-scène lifts this out of the common run and implies there is much more to come from him.

The Times