The Preservationist's Cold Geometry

About this book:

In the salt-rusted margins of 1954 Fall River, taxidermist Silas Vance has spent a lifetime coaxing dead things back into the shapes of life. Then a government crate arrives on his doorstep, sweating cold in a heated room, carrying something hauled from Pleistocene ice beneath the DEW Line. It has no ears, no navel, and bones machined like clockwork—and its blood freezes the air around it. By the time the Navy moves them to a condemned meat-packing plant, Silas knows he isn't skinning a specimen. He's undressing a machine built from flesh.

Dr. Albright calls it biology. The thing on the table calls it a lie. As Silas peels back scales patterned like circuit boards and finds ribs that stroke like pistons, the specimen begins to wake—not with a breath, but with a sound like a bridge cable singing in high wind. The generator fails. The lights die. In the cobalt glow welling from the creature's opened chest, Albright chambers a round in his .45 and tells Silas to step away. But a preservationist doesn't abandon the mount, even when the mount starts hunting.

*The Preservationist's Cold Geometry* is a masterwork of industrial gothic horror—where taxidermy becomes reverse engineering, and the line between organism and artifact shatters on a frozen slab. For readers who love the procedural dread of *The Andromeda Strain*, the tactile craft of *The Alienist*, and the creeping wrongness of *Who Goes There?*, this is a novel that gets under your skin and rewires the nerves.