The Abyss Gazes Also by Katharyn R. King

The world didn’t end. It simply stopped belonging to us.

It started with whispers in reflections, subtle shifts in the mirror that no one wanted to acknowledge—until people began moving before their shadows. Until voices spoke before mouths did. Until the faces of loved ones peeled open like shedding skin to reveal something cold and infinite inside.

In this relentlessly horrifying, genre-subverting sci-fi body horror, humanity watches in real time as its own image becomes something unrecognizable. Across 25 harrowing vignettes, the novel unfolds like a slow-motion apocalypse—one not of fire and brimstone, but of subtle replacements, creeping inevitability, and the bureaucratic continuation of a world that no longer needs people to function.

From an ICE detention center where detainees realize their guards are no longer human, to the last independent newsroom broadcasting a desperate warning before being rewritten, to Elon Musk’s Mars colony discovering that space is no refuge—each chapter brings a different perspective of civilization being absorbed, dissolved, and mirrored into something else.

In the hollowed-out shell of Washington D.C., Congress is still in session. The U.S. government never fell. It kept running, passing laws, maintaining order—just without any real people left.

And at the end of it all, one last survivor sees herself speaking before she ever opens her mouth.

This isn’t a pandemic. This isn’t an invasion. This is replacement.

And it’s already over.

Because the Abyss Gazes Also.