By Christopher Golden

St Martin’s Press, out now

Deep beneath disputed territory may lie the most terrifying discovery in human history…

Chris Golden’s hero from Ararat, Ben Walker (around whom a TV series is being built) returns for this equally tense and often horrifying adventure, in which it seems that nothing and nobody is quite what surface appearances would suggest. It’s a book about secrets – some that have been hidden for millennia, others that are far more ephemeral – and the lengths that people will go both to hide and to uncover them.

Having made us shiver with both Ararat and Snowblind, Golden now pulls his reader into claustrophobic depths – I suffer mildly from the complaint, and could feel the walls closing in around the characters in some of the scenes. Walker isn’t the only carryover from the Ark tale, and Golden plays off the knowledge that these people have of something beyond the ordinary realm to contrast with the necessarily sceptical attitudes of others – and then sets those against a far more down to earth threat, in the form of jihadis who have their own agendas.

There’s a flavour of the old Universal horror movies about this as well – the discovery of something mythical that slowly but surely starts to cause the lives of those around to unravel, as the tension mounts and the nature of the evil at work becomes more and more obvious. Golden doesn’t have to restrain himself in the ways those films did, but it feels as if he’s deliberately sparing in his use of the horrific elements – but when they’re there, they pack a punch.

Verdict: Another tight tale that takes a high concept idea and makes it frighteningly plausible. 9/10

Paul Simpson