Ice Machina is a historical steampunk horror novel set in the Arctic during the race for the Northwest Passage.

Age Group: Adult

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Fear broke through me in a stinging rush, sharp as a scream, as I heard the muffled footsteps come towards me. Crunch, scrape. Crunch, scrape. And they were coming from in front, not behind, so Cade must have overtaken me and doubled back, again doubled back –

And then I saw it, and it wasn’t Cade.

I still have no right words for what came walking out of the ice that day. It was a man. Or it had been a man. I shrieked with the strength of gut animal horror and hurled myself backwards. Light flared suddenly behind the thing, throwing its broken, defiled shadow onto the white crags, dull metal glinting hideously in the raw, eyeless head. Then a gun roared, and my legs gave way, and I fell aghast into darkness.

In 1850, the Royal Navy ship Freya sets out for the Arctic in search of the Wayland Expedition, feared lost on its mission to find the Northwest Passage through the ice.  Aboard sails fourteen-year-old Tom Ashwood, desperate to find his beloved brother Will, a Wayland crewman.  Two years later, the last starving survivor of the Freya‘s disastrous voyage, Tom is rescued by the strange steamship Hephaestus, meets its eccentric, secretive crew and learns the chilling truth about the celebrated explorer Sir James Wayland.

As the jaws of the Arctic close around them, Tom and his allies endure searing cold and bitter hunger, unseen killers, onboard treachery and a brutal trek on foot across the merciless ice – until the lost expedition is found at last, and they face the horror of Wayland’s rogue experiments.