What Stalks the Deep

Alex Easton, a retired soldier, gets an urgent summons from Dr. James Denton, the American physician who stood beside Alex during the events of an earlier case. Denton's cousin Oscar has vanished while exploring an abandoned coal mine. Before he disappeared, Oscar wrote letters about a mysterious red light that he meant to investigate.

Alex and a small band of companions go down into the mine to look for him. What they meet underground is a strange, unsettling being that calls itself Fragment. It was once part of a larger hive mind, loosely inspired by Lovecraft's shoggoths, and it wants only to be left alone.

This is the third novella in the Sworn Soldier series, and Alex narrates it again in first person. It follows What Moves the Dead, where Alex and Denton first worked together.

The genre is cosmic horror, played out in tight, claustrophobic spaces where dread builds as the group goes deeper. Dry humor runs through the narration, and the characters are drawn with a sharp eye. Expect a short read that mixes unease with wit.