{ "item_title" : "Hunger", "item_author" : [" Philip Stengel "], "item_description" : "Some doors were sealed for a reason. Utgard Station just drilled through one.On a plateau that holds no name on any map, a research outpost sits alone and listens to the ice. For years it logged nothing worth a second glance. Then the tremors came. They arrived on a schedule no earthquake keeps, once every twelve hours, steady as a pulse and just as patient. The polar network sent a small team north to explain the rhythm and let the world sleep again.Elena Voss came to Utgard to measure the ground and to make peace with a brother the ice had already taken. She did not come to find a mouth beneath the world. Six people boarded the last helicopter to the plateau. A seismologist with a ruined reputation. A young analyst who still believed every problem had an answer. An ex-soldier who had outlived his own hope. Two technicians who wanted the money and the credit. And a disgraced scholar who had spent his life chasing a book about a thing that feeds under the ice, a man who bought his seat with private money and a smile no one trusted.The deeper the drill went, the louder the silence underneath became. The scholar had a name for it. He carried an old codex bound in cracked hide, its runes pressed into the page by a hand that had frozen while it wrote. He read it the way a priest reads scripture, and he wanted the seal opened. Elena wanted it left alone. The ice under their boots stopped feeling like ground and started to feel like a thin lid over a mouth.They came to find an explanation. They found a seal. Below it, something old and awake had been waiting for the drill to reach it. The bit did not stop when it struck the dark water. It slowed, as if pushing through something that wanted to be found.What they wake does not chase them. It does not need to. It hums up through the steel and into their teeth, and every hour it presses a little harder, until the air itself feels like a hand closing. Above the seal stands a Warden that was never meant to be their enemy, a scarred guardian holding a line older than the station and paying for it in blood. Below the seal waits the Hunger, and the Hunger has been counting every heartbeat since they arrived.The storm closes the door behind them. There is no radio, no rescue, and no way up that does not lead further down first. The ice takes the weak early, in ways that leave the others no time to grieve. The cavern that opens beneath the plateau is built like an open throat, ringed with stacked skulls and a dais that asks for an offering. To climb back into the light, Elena will have to decide what a single life is worth, and whether feeding the thing below is a rescue or the first step in becoming part of it.Beowulf remade as Arctic cosmic horror, where the monster at the door is the only thing holding back the monster underneath.Inside THE HUNGER you will find: A relentless creature-horror descent through blizzard, black ice, and a chamber that breathesAn ancient seal, an ossuary of the taken, and a ritual that demands a price paid in the livingBody horror that earns every wound, and a slow corruption that spreads from the inside outA guardian monster, a hungrier god beneath it, and a myth older than the ice made realTwo survivors who reach the coast, and a dread that follows them all the way homeIt sang under the plateau. It sang under the sea. Now it sings under the floor of a warm, safe room a thousand miles away, patient as ever, waiting for someone to turn around and answer.Some hungers can be fed. This one only learns your name and waits for you to say yes.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/828/408/9798284086629_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "13.99", "online_price" : "13.99", "our_price" : "13.99", "club_price" : "13.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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