Two weeks from now, on Monday morning, I'm flipping the switch that makes Last Light in the Dark free on Amazon for five days. June 1 through June 5. Worldwide. No newsletter form, no email capture, no pre-order trick. You buy it for zero dollars, you keep it, and if you want to keep going after, the rest of the series is in Kindle Unlimited.
That's the entire mechanic. The rest of this post is me telling you what you're going to read if you grab it.
The premise, in one breath
A salvage team gets pulled off a routine cleanup job because something has eaten an entire solar system. Not metaphorically. A sphere of absolute darkness — the Void — wrapped around a planet, its moon, and everything that used to live there. Three days of silence. Drones don't return. A First Citizen supersoldier walked in and never came back. So the brass starts sending in human teams as the last resort before they call the whole system gone.
Marcus Reeves and his four teammates draw the moon base. Two other teams get the planet.
The other two teams are not in the rest of this story, and I want you to think about why for a second.
The book is what happens when those five people land on the wrong side of the Void barrier. The book is also what happens to the seven-year-old girl they find in a stasis pod halfway down.
Why I wrote a sci-fi horror book
I get this question a lot now, mostly from readers who came in through the supernatural thrillers. Why pivot? Why this?
The honest answer is I wanted to write Alien. I wanted to write the specific kind of claustrophobic, slowly-getting-worse, technology-doesn't-save-you horror that the first two Alien movies do better than anything else has ever done, and I wanted to put it on a moon base where the corridors are the wrong shape. I wanted to write a Fist of the First Citizen — a state-of-the-art augmented supersoldier — and then show you what's already living down there that ate one of those.
I also wanted to write Kate.
I'm not going to tell you much about Kate Morrison. The book does that better than I can do it in a blog post. What I'll say is she's the part of this series that surprised me when I was writing it. I started Last Light in the Dark thinking it was a five-person ensemble horror book in the vein of every space marine movie I grew up on. By chapter eleven I knew I was writing something else. By chapter eighteen I knew this wasn't a one-book story.
That's why there's a Book 2 already out, and a Book 3 after that, and the series has its own tag on this site with twenty-five posts on it. Last Light in the Dark is the door. The series is the building.
What the team is
I want to say a word about the team, because the Goodreads reviews tend to either really love them or really wish I'd skipped to the monsters faster, and there's no in-between.
Marcus Reeves is the recorder. He's the POV most of the book — not the hero, the documenter. He's the one who notices the stuffed bear floating in the wreckage in chapter one and feels a cold certainty that nothing about the rest of his life is going to be the same. He's also the one who keeps writing things down when he probably shouldn't.
Rylee Voss is the commander. She is not a stoic-Ripley archetype. She is exhausted, she is the only one with the full briefing, and she is making bad choices because they are the least-bad choices available. I love her.
Lucas Chen is the flamethrower specialist. He gets a wound in the first third of the book that he refuses to take seriously, and the way that wound progresses is the closest thing this book has to a clock. Watch the wound. The clock is the wound.
Chelsea Park is the engineer. Chelsea is the reason the team is still alive in chapter eight, full stop. She's also the one who reads the dust on the hangar floor before anybody else does. She's the one who hears the whispers in the vents and doesn't bring it up because she doesn't want to be the woman who heard whispers in the vents.
Nigel Rhodes is the analyst. He's the one who finds the 200-year-old mission logs and figures out what a Fist operative being sent down here actually means. He is also the funniest one in the rotation and the one I had the most trouble writing, because the rule of this book is that the moments of relief are very, very brief.
And Kate. Kate hums. That's all I'm going to say.
What you're not getting
I'm going to be blunt about what this book isn't, because I want you to grab it knowing what you're walking into.
It is not optimistic. The optimism, when it comes, comes the way it comes in The Mist or in Annihilation — late, narrow, and at a cost.
It is not a clean-resolution book. Eighteen chapters and the Void is still sealed at the end. They are still inside the system. The book is the first move in a longer game, and Book 2 picks up four minutes after Book 1 ends.
It is not hard science fiction. I don't care what the engine specs are. I care that Chelsea has to engineer a way out of black, living ooze using the maintenance vents, and I care that you feel her doing it. If you wanted Andy Weir, this isn't that. If you wanted Andy Weir crossed with Event Horizon, sit down.
It is also not for kids. There is body horror in this book. People die badly. The parasitic infection chapter is the chapter I get the most uncomfortable emails about, and I stand by every word of it.
Why the promo, and why now
Quick honest beat. June 1 starts a five-day KDP Select free run, and I'm doing it because the second the Last Light series has its first three books out the gate, the entry point starts working harder if it costs nothing. That's the math. People download a free Book 1, the ones who like it move into Kindle Unlimited and read the rest at no additional cost, and a small percentage of those end up buying the paperback or telling a friend.
That cycle is the entire economic engine of this six-series back catalog. I'm not above explaining it. The whole stack is in Kindle Unlimited because I'd rather have you reading than have you paying me four dollars and resenting it. Five days free on Book 1 is the part where I open the door.
The promo runs Monday June 1 through Friday June 5, midnight to midnight Pacific. If you live somewhere that isn't the U.S. — and I have a meaningful number of readers in the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Germany — Amazon runs the promo in your store too, in your local currency, at zero of it.
If you're reading this after June 5 because you found the post in a search result later in the year, the book is still in Kindle Unlimited and the rest of the series is still binge-ready. The free window matters most for the people who are paying per book. KU readers get it free every day of the year.
Where to grab it
Last Light in the Dark on Amazon — Free June 1 through 5
Same link works for Kindle, the Kindle app on your phone, the web reader, the Paperwhite, and the Fire tablet. If you're in Kindle Unlimited, the book is free for you any day of the year anyway — but grab the free copy during the promo regardless, because then you own it and it doesn't disappear from your library if you ever cancel KU. That's a thing I learned the hard way when I dropped KU for three months in 2024 and lost about four hundred books I thought were "mine."
The paperback is not part of the promo. The paperback is $14.99 and will remain $14.99, because I have no control over print costs and I'm not going to ship you a paper brick at a loss. If you want the paperback, wait for a Black Friday sale or grab it now at full price. The story is the same either way.
What to read next if you like it
This is the part of every promo post where the author tells you to buy nine more books. I'm going to tell you to read three more.
Last Light Book 2 picks up exactly where Book 1 ends, with the team in the shuttle and Kate in the seat next to Marcus. It is the book where the corruption stops being on the moon. It is the book where the Void barrier starts to mean something more than just a wall around a solar system.
Last Light Book 3 is where the series starts paying off the foreshadowing I planted in the first half of Book 1. If you read Book 1 closely enough to notice the dust resettling over the team's footprints in chapter four, you are going to love what Book 3 does with that detail. There are two specific lines from chapter four of Book 1 that become the central engine of Book 3. I won't tell you which lines. You'll know.
Both books are in Kindle Unlimited. Both are written. You don't have to wait, the way you would for most ongoing series. I write the whole arc before I publish the first book, so the series is the series. No surprise hiatus, no Book 4 in 2031.
Three things I'd tell you to watch for
If you're the kind of reader who likes to spot the moving pieces — and if you found this blog, you probably are — here are three things to keep your eye on while you're inside the book. None of these are spoilers. All three are seeded in the first six chapters.
First, the language. The dock master on the moon base speaks in oddly formal phrases when the team makes radio contact in chapter four. "Hunky dory." That phrase is doing more work than it looks like it's doing. Pay attention to who says it next.
Second, the geometry. The corridors of the alien city are not built for human bodies. They are also not built for the bodies of the things now living in them. The architecture is a third character. There is a reason the team starts seeing structures move when they only look at them from peripheral vision, and the reason is not their stress response.
Third, the song. Kate is not the only one who can hear it. She's the only one who knows what she's hearing. Watch the rest of the team for the moments where they react to something they didn't consciously register. There are six of those moments in the book. I'm not going to tell you which scenes.
That's the whole book in three pieces of advice, and none of them ruins it.
A note for the people who already read it
If you've already read Last Light in the Dark — there are about 1,200 of you according to my KDP dashboard, plus another handful who borrowed it through KU and never registered as page-reads — share the promo with one person. Not on Twitter, not on a Reddit thread that'll get downvoted to negative because the sub doesn't allow self-promo. Text one person who likes this kind of thing. Forward this email if you're reading it in your inbox. That's the part of book marketing that's still better than anything an ad platform has ever done for me, and the budget for it is one minute of your time.
If you've never read it, grab it on June 1. If you don't like it, the ledger reads zero dollars and three hours of your time, and I'll wear the L.
If you do like it — and the early Goodreads numbers are running a little over 4.3 stars, which for sci-fi horror is roughly the ceiling because the people who hate horror tend to one-star anything in the genre — I'll see you in Book 2.
Set a reminder. June 1, free, link above. That's all.
— Lincoln Cole
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