Hell Below Zero

Or, what happens when you watch John Carpenter’s THE THING and read John W. Campbell’s WHO GOES THERE maybe one to many times…

I love science fiction. I was addicted as a very young child and, with any luck, I’ll never recover. I hope I don’t, anyway. And since I keep getting readdicted—shout out to Murderbot and a big thanks to Martha Wells—I don’t see any change anytime soon.

In some sort of circuitous-or-not-so way, that leads me to my book HELL BELOW ZERO, which I recently republished with a new cover. There’s this frozen lake beneath about a mile of glacier in Antarctica called Lake Vostok. And that set me to wondering, as one does if she’s a writer, what might still be in those isolated waters that have been cut off from a changing Earth for millennia? What might samples of that pristine water contain?

Well, considering it was my weird subconscious doing the wondering, those samples would no doubt contain a microscopic vermiform creature that had the ability to force its way into the human brain via the optic nerve and start to breed. And grow. And mutate. No, not the worm mutating; the human host.

So, not really THE THING, but certainly first cousin. This worm is from Earth, not a distant planet, and it doesn’t so much want to replicate humans as it wants to feed off them as it changes. And grows. And expands into warmer, richer climes.

Feel free to insert some creepy theremin music here, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys 50’s sci-fi movies who loved that. I confess to a not-so-secret passion for those eerie tones myself.

But mutating worms taking over the human body doesn’t really tell a story, does it? What tells the story—or, actually, who tells the story is Hank Martinez aka Marty, who’s the engineer/maintenance man at an Antarctic oil drilling camp. The camp doubles as a research laboratory when most of the drillers go home for the winter, leaving a handful of scientists, a few support crew and a single drilling team, who spend the dark months drilling and examining core samples from below the surface—and from the waters of Lake Vostok.

Or, as my blurb puts it:

A team of scruffy drillers. A coterie of scientists. A newly-arrived doctor with a secret agenda. An engineer/handyman who may well be the key to everything. What can any of them do, trapped at the bottom of the earth and surrounded by ice and cold and darkness? Who will survive in this Hell Below Zero?

Yep, that about covers it. Or maybe, instead of bug, it’s some sort of weird microscopic creature that’s rewriting my DNA…

You can check out HELL BELOW ZERO here: https://books2read.com/u/m0LXr7