THE UNDERDWELLING by Tim Curran

Setting and atmosphere is so important in many horror stories and this book has that in spades! This novella by cult favorite horror author Tim Curran is about a young miner who is excited for his new post on a graveyard shift team to work the bottom levels of the Hobart mine, because it means extra dough that'll help with his new baby on the way. But on his first night, a new, deeper section of the mine is revealed and because he's all macho and shit, he volunteers with a group to explore it. And what they find is a horror that's been hidden for thousands of years. 

This one is actually even better than the previous novella I've read by Curran, Blackout, mostly due to his skillful rendering of the environment: the absolute, claustrophobic darkness deep beneath the earth and the way it can break the mind, the smells, the sounds that shouldn't be there, and the hopelessness of being trapped. Curran is great at setting a scene and maintaining mood.And points for a chilling ending that's even more fucked up than I expected...

If you enjoyed The Descent, that tense, heart attack of a movie about a group of badass women discovering horrors underground and directed by my buddy Neil Marshall, you should give this novella a spin!

GRADE: B+