The Glass Deep: A Space Horror Novel

by F. G. Harrow

Genres: Horror; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Rule 1. Never touch the water.
Rule 7. No voice above a whisper after dark.
Rule 12. The Lanterns learn your voice.

Ondine is all ocean. It’s eleven kilometres deep and so clear you can see four of them straight down. Across it drift the glass reefs, vast as cathedrals, with domes and spires and lattice walkways grown by something alive. The guides call the water the Clean. Drop a strip of meat into it, and in fifty seconds there is nothing left.

Teo Marsh has led tourists across Ondine for eleven years. She knows every Rule by heart, and the name of every person who died so it could be written down. She keeps one rule of her own: never like a client before the second day.

This season she has Aurelio Ferro, the billionaire who quietly bought a third of the expedition company. Four years ago his daughter went through the glass during the Bloom and sank into the deep. Now he has come back with his son, a locked case and a reason for coming that he hasn’t told anyone.

Then a storm belt four thousand kilometres long jumps north weeks early and cuts them off from home. Their skiff is lost. The only way out is on foot: seventy kilometres across drifting reefs that grind and shatter against each other, carrying every drop of water they will drink.

And something is following them. It hunts by sound. It can leave the water. And it has started speaking in the voices of the dead.

Every Rule on Ondine was paid for with a life. Before this crossing ends, Teo will have to write new ones.

The Glass Deep is Book One of The Cathedral Worlds, a slow-burn space horror novel for fans of Annihilation, The Deep by Nick Cutter and A Quiet Place.

Release date: June 2, 2026

Print pages: 443