Another completed action/horror novel waiting to be released while I decide how best to do that. This is an initial idea for a cover. It’s basically an adventure story with horror and science-fiction elements.
Lee Mitchell is a chief drilling engineer reluctantly committed to what he considers a boondoggle of a job – spending years and millions on a deep drill project in Africa that couldn’t possibly lead to any significant discoveries of oil or gas. His opinion on the value of the project puts him at odds with his superiors, including Angeline, the woman he sleeps with, but he agrees to go along with it all to keep the peace – and maybe his job.
Until they discover something other than oil.
Despite being only a fraction of the way through the Earth’s crust, the primary drilling team punches through to a large cavity five miles down that results in a blowout of the drilling rig, causing massive damage. Lee and Angeline follow a damage assessment team to the site to investigate and find that the rig may be salvageable…but the drilling team manning it have all disappeared.
While trying to discover the cause of the blowout and find the missing men, the shift in their motivation for the project begins to turn from economic to scientific. This cavity far below could be a find of substantial intellectual value.
But then they see the demons. Large, black-skinned humanoid creatures cover the landscape below, looking all the world like the classical Western image of the denizens of Hell, complete with horns, tails and fangs.
The team are split into two factions; those who believe the possibility that they have discovered Hell, and those who think it could merely be an underground realm of earth with its own different lifeforms, or even a portal to another dimension. As they debate the scientific and religious ramifications of their find, horrifying and inexplicable events above ground begin to occur.
The missing men begin to turn up.
Only they aren’t men anymore. They walk the African countryside like aimless animals, their bodies empty shells, cooked inside, their minds hollowed out.
Yet they walk.
To find the answers, Lee and the others will have to investigate further, and cameras and sensors can only show them so much. They will have to go down there, five miles below the surface; a feat that should be impossible, yet the conditions below make it feasible.
But not easy.
What they find is a terrifying and deadly place that challenges their loyalties to each other, as well as their ideas about the nature of reality…and evil. Lee and his friends also discover a new certainty about existence; that death is not the most terrifying thing we must face.
What comes after can be far worse.
Author Jay Gould 