Ryan Rennik

Set in 2004, Black Site, Black Mother begins when the CIA abducts “the Engineer,” a man believed to be the head of Al Qaeda’s biological weapons program. He is taken to a black site in Poland where he is interrogated by several CIA officers, led by Mark Romero. They learn that the Engineer is insane and devoted to a figure he calls “the Black Mother,” who supposedly has a plan to transform the world in her own image. As Mark and his colleagues try to figure out if this is simply the product of a deranged mind, strange and disturbing things begin happening at the black site. Mark himself begins to have nightmarish encounters with the Black Mother. Too late to stop it, Mark must accept that the Engineer’s stories about the Black Mother may herald her arrival and that her horrific attempt to transform the world is about to begin.

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Blurbs:

Black Site, Black Mother is a terrifyingly crafted vision of a man questioning not only his own morality, but that of his co-workers, his country, and their enemy, all the while failing to take notice that beyond man’s inhumanity, something monstrous lurks in the darkness, waiting to take advantage of the pain and madness. Ryan Rennik’s slow burn novel of personal apocalypse is steeped in the lore of Lovecraftian Horror but is more than capable of standing on its own, and sets Rennik in the same class as James Moore, Brian Keene, and Mary SanGiovanni, carving out a new and distinct cosmic horror mythology.

—Peter Rawlik, author of The Cthulhu Heresy and Other Lovecraftian Sins

So much of Black Site, Black Mother feels dangerous, perhaps even forbidden to read because of Rennik’s frightening ability to place the reader in such close proximity to the horrors on the page. Arresting and utterly original, Rennik’s novel is a blistering portrait of war, surveillance, and transformation.

—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Ryan Rennik has given us a relentless and propulsive cosmic body horror underpinned by unsettling anxieties about what the US has become in the post-911 world. The CIA agents and contractors trying to break the will of a high-value abductee at a black site somewhere in Poland, find themselves questioning who, or even what, is in control of their interrogations. And once that question is broached, the granular, concrete detail of a spy thriller that begins on the dusty streets of Peshawar, unravels at dizzying speed into full blown phantasmagoric catastrophe. Black Site, Black Mother is the very definition of nihilistic, hallucinatory pandemonium. It’s like dropping that tab of acid you got from H.P. Lovecraft just before you settle down to enjoy your favorite Tom Clancy.

—Robert G. Penner, author of The Dark King Swallows the World

Black Site, Black Mother is creeping dread with a dynamite finish. Part military thriller, part Lovecraftian horror, and all of it uncomfortably believable. Rennick writes like he’s seen things the rest of us—luckily—haven’t.

—K.L. Young, author of The Secret Language of Spiders

Black Site, Black Mother deftly balances various genre conceits—​it’s a found document novel, a claustrophobic military thriller, and a Lovecraftian work of cosmic horror. Lean, expertly paced, and teeming with hypnagogic visions of weird grotesquerie, this is a freakily compelling read.

—Mike Thorn, author of Peel Back and See

Black Site, Black Mother is a novel that intertwines several genres: spy thriller, horror, and what I guess I’d call CIA procedural rather than police procedural. The story takes place at a Black Site in Poland where CIA agents are interrogating terrorists post-September 11. With one terrorist, they discover something worse than a dirty bomb. It felt like I was watching a very good extended episode of The X-Files while an elder god whispered Lovecraftian nightmares in my ears. Calling it creepy doesn’t do it justice. A solid read.

—Charles Allen Gramlich, author of Razored Land

Brilliant. Mark Romero used to be a captain in the US Army. Now he’s a CIA operative, fully committed to the War on Terror, his dedication to preventing another 9/11 making strangers of his family. He cannot tell them about his latest assignment to a remote forest in Poland, for it’s a Black Site. The man known within Al Qaeda as ‘The Engineer’ used to be microbiology student at Virgina Tech. Now he’s an important asset, tasked with working on the next terrorist outrage. But he cannot tell his Brothers of the one who truly guides his actions, for she is the Black Mother. When their paths meet, Romero must try all he knows to break through the Engineer’s web of evasions and cryptic clues. But will he unearth a planned biological attack? Or is something far darker and far more terrifying coming ever nearer?

—Mark N. Drake, author of the Jack Glennison Darkisle novels