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The Dead Hours: as told by Razvan Chernykh
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 9 2025
Pages: 226
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In Old Varnis, 2:14 AM is when the shadows come alive-and nothing human survives unchanged.
Razvan Chernykh wakes at precisely 2:14 AM to witness horrifying shadow creatures rearranging his sister's face into a grotesque new configuration. But when time resumes its normal flow, no one notices anything wrong except him. As the city sleeps, Razvan discovers he's the only one who can see the truth: reality itself is being edited during the dead hours, and those who witness it become marked for something worse than death.
When police officers commit synchronized suicide after being infected by glass parasites, Razvan knows he must document the invasion. But the shadows are hunting him, leaving messages written in his own translucent flesh: YOU'RE AWAKE. His desperate investigation leads him to a basement museum filled with alternate versions of himself-each one a failed attempt to survive the culling.
After a brutal confrontation, Razvan splits into three identical copies, each sharing the same memories but developing distinct personalities. Together, they join a resistance movement led by the mechanically-enhanced Iskra Vrazhek, who reveals a terrifying truth: the shadows are transforming Earth into a processing center for the cosmic entity known as the Mrak.
The three Razvans embark on a suicide mission to the moon, now revealed as a massive neural network built from compressed human bodies. What they discover there changes everything they understood about reality-the universe is being consumed by entities from the Underlayer, and Earth is just one of countless worlds being harvested.
When they return to Earth, they find the city transformed into a meat cathedral-buildings constructed from living tissue, streets made of vertebrae, windows replaced by blinking eyes. Former friends and loved ones have been incorporated into the architecture, still conscious but unable to escape. At the heart of this biological nightmare, Razvan confronts the Mrak and must make an impossible choice that will determine not just his fate, but the fate of all existence.
The Dead Hours is a relentless descent into cosmic body horror that explores the nature of consciousness, identity, and the terrifying possibility that our reality is merely food for something beyond comprehension. Brian Babiak crafts a narrative that transforms from intimate psychological horror to a universe-spanning nightmare, leaving readers questioning the boundaries between self and other, predator and prey, beginning and end.
For fans of Thomas Ligotti's philosophical cosmic horror, Clive Barker's visceral body transformations, and the reality-bending narratives of Brian Evenson. Not for the faint of heart-this novel contains graphic descriptions of body horror, psychological trauma, and existential dread that will linger long after the final page.
When the shadows come, they don't just change your body-they rewrite your story.
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