Is Abyss by Nicholas Binge Actually That Good?

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Have you ever clocked in to work, then found yourself sitting, staring at your screen, feeling something quietly leave your body?

Not your soul. Nothing that dramatic. Just…a little piece of the version of you that used to make things. Used to read for fun. Used to call your friends back. Hang out with someone other than yourself.

You get to a point where you skip the small talk at your morning coffee run because it is more efficient. You scroll on your lunch break and tell yourself it’s resting. Getting lost in reels and TikTok videos at 11 pm and calling it winding down. You wake up tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix, and somewhere in the back of your mind, a small voice goes: “Is this it? Is this actually it?“

Yeah.

Abyss by Nicholas Binge puts a relatable story to that voice.

So, is this short, eerily vicious little novella actually that good, and worth you adding to your TBR? Pull up a chair. We need to talk.

Title: Abyss

Author: Nicholas Binge

Publisher: Tor Nightfire

Format: eARC/Physical

Genre: Horror, Cosmic Horror, Science Fiction

Release Date: May 12, 2026

Pages: 160

Star Rating: 5 stars

Spice Rating: 0 chili peppers

The Vibes

Here’s the thing about Abyss.

It’s a quiet, creeping kind of horror.

There’s no masked man chasing you with a chainsaw. No final girl sprinting through acres of fields. Just a man. A job. And a building that feels just slightly wrong in ways he can’t articulate.

When Joe Rice walks through Ponos Ltd. on his first day as an administrative assistant, the lobby is barren. There are no people, just rows and rows of computers. Department names on the directory signs hanging above have been redacted with a single, deliberate stroke of black ink across the label. Almost as if someone wanted you to know they were hiding something.

The people Joe does locate all carry this strange hum of urgency. Like the building itself is on a timer.

The man on the third floor blocks his view into a room, twitchy, locking the door swiftly and snapping the blinds closed. Virgil, the line leader, pressed a sheet of paper facedown on Joe’s desk like he physically could not bear to let go of it, and practically screamed at him to not, under any circumstances, photocopy it.

It is so… strange.

And yet downright incredible.

The Real Genius: Joe Doesn’t Trust Himself

Here’s the part that wrecked me (and I suspect will wreck you just the same).

Joe isn’t an idiot. In fact, although he tries not to, he notices everything. Every weird smile, every blacked-out door, every moment the air gets thicker.

He just doesn’t trust his own noticing.

He reasons. Explains. Smoothes. Convinces himself he’s being dramatic. He’s anxious. He doesn’t want to seem ungrateful. Things naturally feel inefficient to him; it’s better to keep moving, keep producing, keep his head down.

Do not engage…it’s unproductive.

Nicholas Binge has done something quietly devastating here: the inner workings of the “company” and Joe’s mind are running hand in hand. The system doesn’t necessarily have to coerce him. Joe coerces himself. The cage was already inside him before he ever walked into the physical representation of it.

And that, that, is the horror.

Because, as people, at some point, we have all done that.

We have all swallowed the alarm bell in our chest and called it ambition. Have all skipped the conversation, the meal, the callback, the rest, because you have convinced yourself that rest is failing. We have all looked at slightly wrong situations and decided that we must be the ones wrong.

Abyss is the perfect, dizzying balance of “Am I crazy?” and This is crazy”, and it is so, so well done.

You don’t read this book.

You get pulled through it.

And by the time you flip the last page, you are sitting there, Abyss closed, sitting on your lap, breathing with weight, going: what in the absolute fuck did I just read.

This Is A Billionaire Horror Story

Abyss is dressed up like a cosmic horror, and yes, it technically is one. There is a creature. There is a hum hidden in the dark. It even has a Lovecraftian undertow throughout the story.

But layered underneath the drab beige carpet and the crazy WellBot check-ins is a story about who gets to live forever and who pays the price for it.

Ponos Ltd. (and even the name is doing some of the work here, because Ponos is the Greek personification of toil, of hardship, of the kind of grinding labor the gods invented as punishment) was established in the 1920s by a man called Archibald Gibbons-Rash. The Gibbons-Rash family is not your average shady executives. They are a dynasty of occult-obsessed aristocrats who, a hundred-plus years prior, made a deal.

They feed an ancient entity.

In return, they don’t die.

And the genius of Binge’s premise is what the creature eats.

It doesn’t eat bodies.

Doesn’t even eat time in the traditional vampiric sense.

It eats potential. The creativity you might have made something with. The novel you might have written. The love you might have grown into. The friendship you might have nurtured if you weren’t so worn down. The version of you that existed before the algorithm started feeding you slop you don’t really need, and the corporation started feeding on the slop you become because of it.

A handful of immortals get eternal life.

The rest of us get a lifetime of quiet desperation broken up by TikTok videos and YouTube rabbit holes.

Tell me that doesn’t sound exactly like our actual world right now.

This is the billionaire class rendered in tentacles. Wage slavery as a literal blood pact. This is every single tech billionaire pouring money into longevity research while the rest of us get our wages garnished by burnout and our weekends garnished by just one more email.

Binge isn’t being subtle (not even a little). He doesn’t have to be. He has written a horror novella in which the monster is the system, and the system has a face, a name, and a 1920s founding date.

It is vicious.

It is correct.

And it is the kind of social commentary that horror, at its best, has always done. Wrapped around your spine before you realize the book is doing anything at all.

Read Abyss if You Like:

• cosmic horror novellas with literary teeth
• Lovecraftian horror that trades the seaside for the open-plan office
• books that go straight for the throat of late-stage capitalism
• quiet, creeping dread over jumpscares
• unreliable narrators who are unreliable, mostly because we all are
• Tor Nightfire’s run of smart, weird, genre-bending horror
• Nicholas Binge’s previous work (Acension, Dissolution)
• horror that has meaning

Not for you if:

• you want fast-paced action horror with clear monsters and clear rules
• you’re burned out and need something soft right now (come back to this one later, it will be there)
• workplace dread is a personal trigger, you’re not in the mood to poke at
• you don’t vibe with novellas or with endings that refuse to tie themselves in a bow
• you want a tidy, hopeful resolution where the system gets fixed

Final Verdict: Is Abyss Actually That Good?

Yes.

Genuinely. Unequivocally. Five stars and immediately pre-ordering whatever he writes next, yes.

Abyss is one of the smartest, sharpest, most quietly devastating horror novellas I have read all year. It is short enough to inhale in one sitting and heavy enough to sit on your chest for weeks.

It’s cosmic horror that knows exactly what it is doing. It is corporate horror that has something to say. A novella that looks at the slow rot of what we consider modern life. The productivity worship, the algorithmic feeding, the dynasties getting richer while the rest of us get hollowed out. Giving it shape, weight, and teeth.

Go read it.

Then go call someone you love.

Before things get to the version of you that still remembers to. 🖤

Thank you to Tor Nightfire for sending me a copy of Abyss to read and review.

Don’t forget to grab a copy of Abyss from Bookshop.org and add it to your TBR.