Out of the Earth

A totalitarian state has sentenced Jon Farmer and a handful of prisoners to death in the most terrifying way possible: exile into the Black Passage, the lightless labyrinth beneath the world. With no weapons, no supplies, and no map, they must descend into an ever-darkening underworld where something called the Groles stalks the tunnels and sanity frays as quickly as hope. The regime expects them to simply vanish, consumed by darkness and despair. But Farmer clings to a rumor: somewhere below, there might be a way back up. The surface world has forgotten these prisoners completely, and that forgetting is itself a kind of death. What follows is a tense, claustrophobic descent into both the earth and the human spirit, where the characters must reckon with their fears, each other, and the terrible things that move in the deep. This is not polished science fiction. It's raw, strange, and haunted by the ghost of Richard Shaver's infamous subterranean myths. For readers who want their sci-fi rough, weird, and genuinely bleak.