Surprise! I’ve written a spooky new sci-fi horror story.

If you’ve been following my social media posts for the last few weeks, you’ll no doubt have seen it teased that I got into the Halloween spirit and spent the latter half of October writing something spooky. I had intended to finish and publish it before the end of the month, but as always things took longer than I expected. But, not two days into November, I finished the first draft of my new sci-fi horror story, The God Sun.

Coming in very close to the 10,000 word mark, it’s right in the overlap between the categories of Short Story and Novelette. But to put it in perspective, that word count would be about two and a half chapters’ worth of writing in one of my longer books.

It’s inspired primarily by one of my favourite sci-fi horror movies, Event Horizon. But I was also inspired by some crack pseudoscience article I read about the sun being a living, sentient organism, and I thought: That would make a great unknowable cosmic horror antagonist!

The God Sun — What’s it about?

The ISF Althaemenes was the first of its kind. A spacecraft capable of travelling the vast distances to other stars. But on its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri, all contact was lost and its crew never returned.

Four years later, the United Earth Confederacy received the ship’s distress signal.

Captain Helene Cross and the crew of the ISF Apemosyne are sent to determine what happened, and if possible, rescue the wayward explorers. However, all is not as they expected: The crew is long dead, and strange cult-like symbols are scrawled in blood across vessel’s walls.

The God Sun is a completely standalone story for you to enjoy without any prior knowledge of my other books, though you might be able to tell this is still set within the universe of The Augment Saga.

However, it’s not part of the series’ main chronology.

Cover Reveal

So here’s the part you’ve really come here for: The cover reveal!

Once again, I did the cover art and typography myself, and I am absolutely thrilled with how it’s come out. It’s very different from my usual style but I feel like it captures the exact vibe I was going for. Making the evil-looking star was surprisingly easy, though adding the gigantic star-spot in the middle was a tricky balancing act with Photoshop’s blending modes. I had a lot of fun with the typography and came up with several variants before finally settling on this one. Designing the silhouette of the Althaemenes was fun, too!

So, there it is. I hope you like it because I think it’s some of my best cover work yet.

When’s it coming out?

I don’t yet have a release date for The God Sun, but the editing process on this shouldn’t take long at all.

I’m hoping to have it up available for purchase on Amazon before the end of November. I won’t be doing pre-orders or anything like that, and it’s too short to have a print version, so it’ll be ebook only for now. Since the release isn’t too far away, the next thing I’ll post about it is when it’s available!