The Hive

by Ronald Malfi

Genres: General Fiction; Small Town & Rural; Horror

Synopsis

An epic, otherworldly horror novel in the vein of Black River Orchard and American Elsewhere about a wave of collective obsession and paranoia taking over an American suburb. From the Bram Stoker award-nominated and bestselling author of Come with Me.

The residents of Mariner’s Cove are changing…

In the aftermath of a violent storm, a collective obsession is rapidly developing among the people of this quaint suburban neighborhood. Random, everyday items left scattered upon the lawns, the streets, and the shoreline all seem to call out to them. There is an item for almost everyone, and each item has a certain hold over the person who finds it—a hold that soon turns into unwavering infatuation. They hide their items from each other, obsess over them, and they will do anything—anything—to protect them.

The collective hum of bees’ wings...

A young boy finds himself the possessor of a strange and inexplicable power. Is the arrival of this power linked to the increasingly odd and dangerous behavior of the residents of Mariner’s Cove? Has he been granted this power in order to thwart whatever is about to happen in this small, bayside community, or is there a more sinister purpose?

All hail the Dragon...

All eyes are on him now.

The residents of Mariner’s Cove are watching.

They move as one, like a solitary organism, and will do anything to succeed in their single-minded purpose.

They will not be stopped.

Release date: April 14, 2026

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 608

Sample

THE DR AGON
1
Wake up.
Not so much a voice in her head as a needling urgency
prodding the base of her spine.
Wake—
Ellen McBride came reeling from the depths of some black, angry
dream that roared like a dragon, only to find that the dragon was
real. It shook the house, stressing the foundation and rattling picture
frames on her bedroom wall in the dark. By the sound, it was carving
trenches in the roof with its terrible claws, too. Pitch blackness all
around her . . . but then a flash of lightning pulsed at the window above
the headboard, momentarily projecting a blazing rectangle upon the
opposite wall, blinding as a mortar explosion, and Ellen thought, with
a finger of rising concern, Storm. A big one.
She lay in the dark for a moment listening to the storm rival the
labored sound of her own respiration. Her heart was slamming in her
chest, funneling a rush of blood through her ears. The nightmare she’d
been having just a moment ago still floated close to the surface, some
amorphous and sinister shape gliding beneath the murky sheen of a
dreamscape sea, but she could not recall a single detail about it—only
the sensation of acute apprehension that continued to tighten like piano
wire around her throat. Her entire body felt coated in a slick of sweat.
Then, between a lull in the thunder, Cory’s voice called out to her
from somewhere deep in the house—“Mom?”
She climbed out of bed just as the wind outside whipped debris
against the corner of the house and at the windowpane above her bed.
The thundering dragon exhaled what sounded like buckshot against the
glass—chattle chattle chattle. She banged a hip against the nightstand—
“Ouch, damn it!”
—then staggered forward, blind, hands pawing at the darkness
ahead of her.
It wasn’t just the storm.
Something felt wrong.
Not so much a notion or a thought, but that same needling urgency
that had followed her out of sleep.
The hallway was as dark as a mineshaft. She ran one hand along the
wall, felt the nub of the light switch poke her sweaty palm, and thrust
the switch upward. But the hallway remained dark. The storm must
have knocked out the—
“Mom? Are you there? Something’s happening.”
She hurried to his bedroom and threw open the door.
Her son was sitting bolt upright in bed, his frail, shaggy-headed
silhouette a shadow puppet against the intermittent flashes of lightning
that kept illuminating the world outside his bedroom window. Cory’s
bed sheet lay in a tangled heap around his waist, and when she went
to him, feeling for him in the dark, she found that the sheet was damp
from night sweat.
“Mom  .  .  .” His voice was a hollow drum, veined with a pulse of
dread.
“I’m right here, Cory. It’s all right. Everything is all right.”
“It found me. It’s trying to get me.” Panic rising in his voice now.
“It’s just a storm.”
She slid beside him in the bed, pulled him close. She could smell
him in that moment—the clean, sleepy, familiar scent of her ten-yearold son. He was small for his age, his shoulders knobby, his ribcage a
delicate assemblage of quaint and tidy things bound together within
that baby-bird torso. She held him against her now, and could feel his heartbeat, hummingbird-quick, frantic against her breast. For a
moment, Ellen’s mind summoned an image of him as an infant, a pair
of wide, sleepless eyes gazing up at her from the darkness as she paced
for hours and hours around the house in the middle of the night,
desperate to get him to sleep.
“No,” he said, the word partially muffled against the fabric of her
nightshirt. She ran a hand down the nape of his neck and found his
flesh hot and blistering with perspiration. At the feel of her touch, he
drew away from her, glanced at the window beside his bed, then said,
“It’s something else. Something’s happening. It’s so loud—”
Outside, the dragon—
(not a dragon)
—roared again. Cory’s fingers dug into her.
The sound of something cracking above her head caused her to
look up at the ceiling. She saw nothing in the dark, but felt a dusting of
drywall powder her face and sting her eyes.
Cory was right—it was so loud. Maybe not just a normal thunderstorm after all. Those dragon’s roars didn’t sound like ordinary
thunder, and those flashes of light outside Cory’s bedroom radiated
with a sickly electric-white hue unlike any lightning she had ever seen:
not just a flash, but a vast tapestry of light that seemed to linger. Ellen
McBride had never experienced a hurricane, except for on television
and in the movies, but that was the thing that launched itself into her
mind in that moment.
Something heavy thunked against the bedroom window, startling
them both. The glass didn’t shatter, didn’t even crack, but it was loud
and abrupt enough to make them both cry out in unison.
“Get up, Cory. Quick.”
“It’s here,” he said. There was an eerie sense of finality to his voice
that sounded very much unlike him. “It’s here, Mom. It came.”
She didn’t have time to process what it was he’d just said, nor to
decode what it might mean. Instead, she was climbing back out of his
bed, a bit more urgently now, one arm still wrapped around her son’s
narrow shoulders, tugging him toward her, urging him to follow “I think we should go to the basement,” she said, her face
suddenly next to his. Cory’s breath came at her in warm, panicked
jabs. “Everything is going to be okay. I promise. But we need to go
downstairs where it’s safer. Do you hear me?”
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
They hurried together down the hall, and she knew she was
squeezing his hand too tightly while pulling on his arm, their bare
feet slapping hollowly on the hardwood floor, pat pat pat-ing along the
dark train-tunnel of the small ranch house on Cloister Road. It was
darker than it should have been, even at this hour. The power outage
must have extended to the whole block, because when they scurried
by the front windows, she could see that none of the streetlights along
their stretch of road appeared to be on. Even that strange white light
she’d seen simmering through Cory’s bedroom window was no longer
visible. It was as if a thick black cloak had draped itself down around
the entire house.
Another roar directly above them—a deep rumbling sound,
steadily gathering momentum, like a tractor trailer barreling down on
them. Wind galloped across the rooftop, audibly stressing the ceiling
joists. Cory paused, his bare feet skidding to a halt on the floor, and
Ellen could feel her son’s heartbeat throbbing in the palm of his sweatslickened hand.
He seemed to be staring at something in the darkness ahead of
them.
“We need to go, Cory.”
She dragged him toward the basement door, which was nestled in a
nook in the hallway between the dining room and the galley kitchen.
She wrenched the door open, revealing a yawning rectangle of even
greater blackness. A fragment of her nightmare rushed back to her
then: running from some faceless, shapeless thing as it pursued her
through a series of honeycombed corridors. That piano wire constricted
more tightly about her throat.
Just a nightmare. Just a storm.
But then something in the atmosphere shifted, causing the hairs
along her arms to stiffen into quills. She turned to face the window
above the kitchen sink, and saw that the world beyond was once
again aglow with that same eerie, listless light. Beyond that light, she
glimpsed the swirling, soupy miasma that was the world around them.
In a moment of rising terror, she wondered if the goddamn hurricane
had descended directly onto their house, and if they were currently in
the eye of it, watching the rest of Mariner’s Cove swim by in a rotating
torrent of horror. Or worse: that the house itself was the thing twirling
through the air, just like in The Wizard of Oz.
Cory was staring at the scene beyond the window, too.
Hypnotized.
She once again tugged at his hand, urging him toward the open
basement door. “Cory, we need to—”
The window over the sink exploded.
Arrowheads of shattered glass fired across the kitchen, borne on
a blast of furious wind and cool summer rain. Ellen shrieked, and
wrapped protective arms around her son, whose body had gone rigid.
She shielded him as best she could, her own eyes squeezed shut, face
pressed against his, and braced herself for those countless shards of
glass to drive themselves mercilessly into her flesh.
But that did not happen.
Trembling, holding her breath, she raised her head and opened her
eyes. She still had her arms wrapped protectively around her son, his
sweat-dampened hair now blown back from his forehead, his body as
unyielding as the bole of a tree.
She saw that his eyes were impossibly wide.
She saw he was holding both his hands straight out in front of him,
elbows locked, his palms out in a halting gesture.
She turned her head and followed his wide-eyed gaze.
The arrowheads of broken windowpane hung suspended in the
air before them. Countless glittering glass teeth, shimmering in the
eerie static-white glow issuing through the shattered kitchen window. Dead leaves swirled about the kitchen counter, whisked along the tile
floor, and stirred all through the air, a cacophonic whirlwind of leaves,
but those sharp daggers of glass remained motionless in midair mere
inches from them. Even the storm seemed to be holding its breath.
This is not real, she thought. I am still in bed and dreaming.
Crazily, she thought she might be able to reach out and touch one
of those shards of glass floating inches from her face, just pluck it right
out of the air or perhaps flick it with her finger, and maybe it would
even make a pleasant chiming sound, tink, like flicking the rim of a
wineglass. But she found herself powerless to move.
This is not real.
Cory’s body shuddered in her arms. He swept both his hands toward
the floor and the collection of glass shards obeyed the command,
plummeting to the kitchen tiles with a tinkling, almost musical clatter.
Ellen felt her son’s exhalation exit his lungs and a second shudder
travel down the entire length of his body as she clutched him more
tightly to her chest. It seemed as if his whole body had deflated. Rain
rushed in through the busted window over the sink and danced along
her face, and his skin felt so hot, she imagined those raindrops sizzling
to steam. She stood there, staring at the arrangement of shattered glass
among the slick black blanket of dead leaves that were slowly gathering
along the kitchen floor.
Cory’s voice, traversing across some distant plane of existence:
“Mom . . . ?”
She couldn’t move. A part of her was still staring at those jewels of
broken glass hovering there in midair, staring at them in her mind,
where they had only been—impossibly—just a moment before. And
yet another part of her—
(run chase run something’s coming something)
—was certain she was still snared in the nightmare, confident that
she must be there, and that all the things that didn’t make sense didn’t
have to make sense, because this was nothing more than a bad dream,
a bad dream, a bad dream . . .
“Mom.” He was facing her now; somehow, he’d worked his way out of her
arms without her knowing. She could feel the warmth of his breath
against her rain-speckled face. It took a moment before her eyes could
focus on him.
“You’re right, Mom. We need to go in the basement where it’s safe,”
he said. Her words in his mouth now.
A reversal of roles.
A tripping of a wire.
Something—
—she knew—
—had transpired between them.
“Yesssss,” she said, and the word, snakelike, hissed out of her.
His hand in hers, gripping tightly. His palm no longer sweaty, but
cold—nearly ice. That sudden reversal of roles, continuing, protracted
and stretching in her mind like taffy: her son leading her down that
yawning black throat that descended into the basement, step after
blind step, closing the door behind them and letting the darkness
swallow them whole. Yet a part of her mind still lingered in the
kitchen, still gaped at those bright, shimmering teeth of glass, hanging
there, suspended, all of them, impossibly so, frozen in time, and in her
mind’s eye a finger extended, a flick on the glass—
Tink.
It resonated in the echo chamber of her skull. ...