First published 2026
The Underground burns with record heat as London swelters through its hottest summer ever. When five strangers board an unlucky tube carriage, they witness something terrible in the suffocating tunnels below the city. A tube driver weary from years of service, a civil servant losing faith in the system, a trader chasing success in the financial district, a hotel worker drowning in demands, and a young homeless man surviving day to day find themselves linked by this shared trauma. The problem is none of them can quite recall what they saw. Something ancient and ravenous stalks the labyrinthine passages beneath London, feeding on the misery of a city where prices climb while wages stagnate and commuters pack into trains like cattle. The five must piece together their fractured memories and work as a team to confront the entity before it devours them all. Their unlikely alliance becomes their only hope for survival in the clay tunnels where heat builds with nowhere to escape.
Genres: fiction, horror, contemporary, thriller, dark-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, claustrophobic, dark, suspenseful, unsettling
Tropes: forced-proximity, found-family, fractured-memories, unlikely-alliance
Setting: London, London Underground
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
384 pages · Paperback · Poisoned Pen Press
Content warnings: death, violence