First Contact Horror

Dr. Renee Caisson knows there are worse things than an attractive man in uniform drafting her into a secret government project—especially when Major Jackson makes it clear that he isn’t bothered by her questionable past. But when her labs come back with decidedly odd results, the Major is forced to come clean over who the government is actually studying. Renee is shocked to learn her subjects are demonic-looking beings who call themselves “Neighbors”—refugees from a dying world, who arrived during the nation-wide solar eclipse.

A government special agent known only as the Signalman gets off a train on a stunningly hot morning in Winslow, Arizona. Later that day he meets a woman in a diner to exchange information about an event that happened a week earlier for which neither has an explanation but which haunts the Signalman. In a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea, a cult leader gathers up the weak and susceptible - the Children of the Next Level - and offers them something to believe in and a chance for transcendence. The future is coming, and they will help to usher it in.

Under 30,000 feet of water, the experimental exploration rig Leaguer has discovered an oil field larger than Saudi Arabia, with oil so sweet and pure, nations would go to war for the rights to it. But as the team starts drilling exploration well after exploration well in their race to claim the sweet crude, a deep rumbling beneath the ocean floor shakes them all to their core. Something has been living in the oil and it's about to give birth to the greatest threat humanity has ever seen.

Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common.

Alien visitors devastate a remote farm in Lovecraft’s first and best venture into science fiction.

When CIA Special Operations officer Major Jim Carter is sent to the town of Serene, Texas, he's still grieving for Agent Cathy Abbey, who was not only a fellow agent—but the woman he loved. And the woman he chose to shoot rather than let Al-Shabaab insurgents abduct her. A decision that haunts him. When Carter arrives in Serene, it's to discover that all one hundred and twenty-one citizens of the town have been murdered by insectoid creatures assumed to be extraterrestrials. None of the authorities know how the aliens arrived on Earth or what their intentions are.

In the deepest, darkest depths of space, the stars are cold, malevolent eyes looking across a vast graveyard of the unknown, the unnameable, and the undead. Here the planets are tombs and the moons haunted catacombs. And here are extraterrestrial nightmares beyond imagining. There is no benevolent first contact. No utopian worlds. Only alien horrors.

We’ve recorded some 400+ stories since 2015 here at HorrorBabble. This collection comprises some of our very favorites. From Blackwood's evocative "The Transfer", through to Smith's terrifying visit to the vaults of Yoh-Vombis, there’s something here to strike fear into the heart of any horror enthusiast....

An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth, in this Tor.com Original science fiction tale from Jeff VanderMeer, the New York Times best-selling author of the Southern Reach trilogy.

For Flight Engineer Cynthia Han and her fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 81 has proved as mundane as space travel ever gets. Yes, this would be Cynthia’s final NASA mission, for reasons she has so far kept from the rest of the crew; and yes, the latest billionaire “space tourist” has managed to irritate everyone on board. Still, none of them could have asked for a smoother experience. Until the morning they wake up to silence. All communication with Earth, gone.

Peter Pendennis killed and dissected eleven people before they caught him. Soon he was safely locked away in an institution - but one of the multiple personalities he is host to claims to be the astronaut John Bruce, who is now running for President of the United States. And when Pendennis is confronted with Louise Callander, Bruce's former girlfriend, he tells her things that only the real John Bruce could know. Nick Stubbs, a scientist investigating the nature of multiple dimensions in their connection to the human brain, was called in to investigate - and now very much regrets it.

X doesn’t have a name. He thought he had one—or many—but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X. He’s also not as human as he believes himself to be. But when he discovers the existence of another—above ground, outside the protection of the Warren—X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

For two years in deep space, the freighter Demeter and a small crew have collected botanical life from other planets. It's a lesson in patience and hell. Mechanics Ensign Raina is ready to jump ship, if only because her abusive ex is also aboard, as well as her overbearing boss. It's only after a foreign biological creature sneaks aboard and wreaks havoc on the ship and crew that Raina must find her grit - and maybe create a gadget or two - to survive...that is, if the crew members don't lose their sanity and turn on each other in the process.

After three years of exile from humanity's war against the Kurians, David Valentine returns to battle. The Lifeweavers, Earth's allies in the conflict, have mostly vanished, but those that remain are held captive by an overlord known as the Seattle Kurian. To free them, Valentine must convince the legendary resistance fighter known as Adler to join his cause. But the "Old Man" is something of an overlord himself....

It's supposed to be a simple job, a look-see operation to make sure something terrible hasn't happened. The leader is prone to fits of violence, and there are rumors of previous human rights abuses. Only, when they arrive, the ship is...empty. The question is - where did everybody go? Armed only with riot gear, they explore the ship, intent on discovering the truth about what's happened on The Ark. What they find will be more nightmarish than anything they've seen before. Indeed, it's worse than anything they could imagine.

Retired (and exiled) Marine Lieutenant General Colby Edison’s farm is overrun by a horde of alien plants, leafy gremlin-like creatures that begin systematically destroying first his crops and then his home. And not just his farm, but all the surrounding farms as well. The relentless plants have apparently killed his neighbors, and clearly, he and his dog Duke are next. But as a retired Marine, Colby has resources and skills not shared by other farmers on the newly terraformed agricultural world of Vasquez and soon he is bringing the fight to the invaders.

Leviathan centipedes. Ravenous wasps. Moon universities. Viscoelastic AI's in the nude. One upstart anthropologist trying to learn echolocation. A tortured weapons dealer dodging exploding flowers. Predator Moons is equal parts horror and wonder. It's Dune meets Pokémon, with a splash of Blade Runner and a touch of Annihilation.

Caitlin Diggs will have more to worry about than her on-again, off-again romance with her FBI superior when the goddess Isis appears in her mind. Is this a trick or perhaps an evil entity linked to her psychic gift offered by the crystal? The crystal has offered Caitlin psychic gifts but also a strange connection to the Star of the Sea, or Isis. Even her cat Bastet seems to share in this linkage. To make matters more complex, Diggs finds the Ennead has returned to Earth as promised. But are they here to share secrets of the pyramids or to take over?

Captain Morgan Starling is a survivor, and the last remnant of her crew. Morgan fights for every scrap of air, stranded in the bowels of her derelict ship. When she is picked up by an alien starship, Morgan finds herself a prisoner of war, forced to excavate an ancient ruin. She was not alone, and the nightmare that killed her crew is getting ready to begin its massacre again. As something awakes from within the earth, ancient enemies threaten to tear the world apart. Morgan and her fellow prisoners must try and escape amongst this maelstrom of horror.

Captain Jeff Austin und seine Crew stranden im interstellaren Leerraum, nachdem ihr Bomber bei einem Einsatz schwer beschädigt wurde. Ihre letzte Hoffnung ist ein riesiges außerirdisches Raumschiff, das scheinbar verlassen zwischen den Sternen treibt. Sie bahnen sich einen Weg hinein. Doch dann wird die Befürchtung zur Gewissheit: Sie sind an Bord nicht allein und schon bald bedrohen unheimliche Wesen die Gestrandeten. Es scheint nur einen Ausweg zu geben: Jeff macht sich mit den letzten Überlebenden auf den Weg zum weit entfernten Zentrum des Schiffes, um dem finsteren Geheimnis der Außerirdischen auf die Spur zu kommen.