The chitin hour 

Something came up out of Jupiter. It has been waiting nine hundred million years for a body with bones in it.

Tyburn Station hangs four hundred thousand kilometres above the largest planet in the solar system — nineteen years of bolted-together pressure hulls, thirty-eight crew, and a mining job so dull that nobody on Earth remembers it exists.

Then a skimmer comes home early from the deep cloud deck with twelve kilos of something in its scoop that no one can name, and a seam ticks open for four hundred milliseconds, and Teodor Marsh breathes it in and does not know.

He loses a tooth. Then his hand stops hurting. Then he hears something eating, patiently, inside his own skull.

By day eleven a woman has been taken apart and applied to a wall four millimetres thick. By day twenty there is a nest behind the bulkhead laying eggs in the dark, and the thing wearing Teodor Marsh is standing on the other side of a pressure door, tapping.

His ex-wife, engineer Wren Halliday, is the only person left who knows what it used to be — and the only one who understands that it cannot be reasoned with, cannot be outrun, and can only be beaten by the one thing in the universe it has never encountered.

Somebody willing to lie to it.

The Chitin Hour is a brutal, claustrophobic space horror survival thriller — a slow-burn descent into extreme body horror and isolation that begins as a siege and becomes a nineteen-year vigil over a hole in the world. Perfect for readers who loved the airless dread of Alien, the paranoid rot of The Thing, and hard-edged deep-space science fiction where nobody is coming to help.

Warning: contains graphic violence, extreme body horror and disturbing medical detail. 18+ readers only.

Scroll up and one-click now — but don't start it at night.

📖 380 pages