Features The Big Thrill Recommends: THE ATROCITY ENGINE by Tim Waggoner

G. A. Rivers

Big Thrill RecommendsFeatures

May 10, 2024

The Big Thrill Recommends: THE ATROCITY ENGINE by Tim Waggoner

Recommended by GA Rivers

THE ATROCITY ENGINE is the latest book by four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Tim Waggoner, and the first entry in a new series about the entropy-battling organization known as Maintenance.

Neal Hudson has seen a lot in his 20 years of working for Maintenance. It’s why he drives the streets of Ash Creek, searching for evidence of the dark entropic force known as Corruption so Intervention can sweep in to eliminate it. When an odd entropy surge draws Neal to a city park, it doesn’t take long for a woman to be left faceless or for inanimate objects to come alive in deadly fashion. With no real weapon to rely on, Neal does what he can, but three people are dead before the crisis ends, and Intervention and Cleanup arrive. Welcome to the Omniverse—a world where damaging dimensional eddies and Corruption-created monsters lurk. A place where evil godlike beings travel through dimensional tears in space, seeking to hasten its entropic collapse and feed the Gyre, the great emptiness lying at its center.

Neal knows the scene at the park is more sinister than it appears, but he bent one rule too many and is promptly sidelined with a new rookie partner, Gina. Neal and Gina have little time for training or to get acquainted because Rachel Blackburn, the ‘school teacher’ responsible for the park attack, is busy unleashing more Corruption and chaos as she works to build a wicked force known as an atrocity engine, a thing so dark and powerful it could destroy the planet. Fortunately, Gina is a staunch and capable partner; their path to stopping Rachel is crossed with Corruption and gore and ends in direct confrontation with the atrocity engine itself.

The story is a thumping, genre-bending tale—one part horror, one part fantasy, and two parts thriller. The pace is frenetic, and the writing delivers. There is an abundance of action and gore, which, delightfully, is not always blood (big green snot tentacles or giant serpents made of corpses, anyone?). For readers who like their tension and thrills to emerge from another Universe, THE ATROCITY ENGINE is one heckuva ride.

The Big Thrill Recommends: THE ATROCITY ENGINE by Tim Waggoner

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G. A. Rivers

G. A. Rivers grew up in a tiny town in the rural Midwest with his nose in a book or wandering the countryside, and was notorious for having signed out most every fiction book in the school library. These days he holds a PhD in the life sciences and has spent over 25 years leading research teams in the pharmaceutical industry, many in the Northeast. A dog lover, husband and proud father of two adult sons, he started writing action-adventure thrillers wherever he and his laptop came to rest—weekends at home, jet planes and hotels, soccer practices, early mornings at Disney World, and many places long forgotten. He is represented by Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management and now lives and writes in the Midwest. You can find him on X/Twitter and Facebook as @ga_rivers and GA Rivers Author.