When his brother Nathan disappears without a trace in the forests of Montana, Clark Smithson knows something is wrong. A thirty-eight-year-old former soldier accustomed to danger and trained to trust his instincts, Clark decides to follow the last trail Nathan left behind. His search leads him to an abandoned Cold War military installation known as Complex D-17, a facility that officially should no longer exist.
But hidden deep beneath the mountain, D-17 holds something no government document was ever meant to reveal.
As Clark descends through the underground levels, he discovers corridors overrun by a mysterious organic substance, abandoned laboratories, forgotten recordings, and evidence of experiments conducted decades earlier. More disturbing still, he learns that Nathan is not the only man who has disappeared. Deep inside the complex, numerous prisoners are being kept alive by an incomprehensible biological system controlled by a massive humanoid creature with four terrifying appendages.
Clark is convinced he has found the monster responsible for everything.
He is wrong.
The creature is not merely the jailer of the men trapped inside the bunker. It is the Guardian of something far older?and far more terrifying.
Behind an enormous seal buried within the mountain lies an entity that has been trying to break free for decades. The Guardian is the only barrier preventing it from reaching the surface, and to maintain that prison, it has transformed the bunker and its occupants into parts of a vast biological system.
Clark must now confront a truth far more difficult than fear: the creature he believes he should hate may be the only being capable of saving his brother?and all of humanity.
Gradually, an impossible bond begins to form between Clark and the Guardian, one that cannot be explained by human rules. First comes fear. Then understanding. And finally, an increasingly profound mental and physical connection through which Clark discovers the loneliness of a creature condemned to fight, decade after decade, in a war no human being even knows exists.
When the seal begins to fail, escape is no longer enough.
Clark must decide which side he is willing to stand on.
And that choice may bind him forever to the creature he once believed was a monster.
The Guardian of the Abyss is an LGBTQ+ MM dark fantasy that blends horror, science fiction, mystery, suspense, body horror, and an unconventional relationship between two radically different beings forced to discover a language of their own while, beneath a mountain in Montana, something ancient waits to be set free.
Because sometimes the real monster is not the one holding us captive.
It is the one someone is trying to protect us from.
