the Evil at Edge of World

Balloon Voyage of Horror In 1889, a group of five scientists aboard an experimental hydrogen balloon lift off from the coast of Britain. They intend to execute a carefully-planned effort to circumnavigate the globe by air flight alone - yet what begins as an orderly flight of observation gradually breaks down into a fearful quest for survival. A small miscalculation at the beginning of the endeavor soon renders the travelers lost, their food and water supplies gone; and, unable to land, they face a slow starvation in the vast cold sky. Even the appearance of the oceans and the land below merely offer new threats and death; and they are obliged to cling to their refuge among the scudding clouds, the balloon itself barely a haven from the dangers beneath. Upon their entry into a wilderness of valleys filled with mountains that rise without limit, an even more dreadful quest for survival becomes apparent - not merely from starvation and exposure to the elements, but from a quivering fear dwelling in the huge regions ahead. Daring to push their balloon beyond its limits in order to make an impossible ascent, the five gradually discern a dark undercurrent of confusion and hatred, the trappings of that which cannot be killed, which is as yet unaware of their presence - but which awaits them nonetheless in the icy heights. At this furthest point, where the rational ends and fangs hunger to close upon human flesh, lies the seething point where all may become fatal prey of The Evil at the Edge of the World. Illumined by the gothic darkness of Mary Shelley and by the spectral wilderness horror of Poe, this tale plumbs the very darkest instances of science and of tameless experience. Here discovery and death meld together, each compounding the other, in a clutching stab into the furthest regions of foreboding and fear. This work bends classic horror and suspense into a new direction, with an unshackled, vile descent into a type of shadow as yet unseen; a cold-blooded otherness that is intimately human while remaining infinitely inhumane. R. J. DENOS is the author of The Terrible Machine of Heaven and Other Stories of Horror, Swinemaster Hoonsferth, Sherlock Holmes and the Murder of Logic, and The Atheism Machine.