Book picks similar to
Chimera by Michael McBride


horror
sci-fi
creature-features
thriller

The Silence


Tim Lebbon - 2015
    Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed... Swarming from their prison, they multiply and thrive. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death.Deaf for many years, Ally knows how to live in silence. Now, it is her family's only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

The Regulators


Richard Bachman - 1996
    It's called Poplar Street. Up until now it's been a nice place to live. The idling red van around the corner is about to change all that. Let the battle against evil begin. Here come...The Regulators

Fragment


Warren Fahy - 2009
    . . an ecosystem that could topple ours like a house of cards. The time is now. The place is the Trident, a long-range research vessel hired by the reality TV show Sealife. Aboard is a cast of ambitious young scientists. With a director dying for drama, tiny Henders Island might be just what the show needs. Until the first scientist sets foot on Henders—and the ultimate test of survival begins . . .For when they reach the island’s shores, scientists are utterly unprepared for what they find—creatures unlike any ever recorded in natural history. This is not a lost world frozen in time, an island of mutants, or a lab where science has gone mad: this is the Earth as it might have looked after evolving on a separate path for half a billion years.Soon the scientists will stumble on something more shocking than anything humanity has ever encountered: because among the terrors of Henders Island, one life form defies any scientific theory—and must be saved at any cost. International Thriller Writers nominee Best First Novel

Jurassic Island


Viktor Zarkov - 2015
    Things go to hell in a hurry once the team reaches the island and the massive megalodon that attacked their boats is only the beginning of their desperate fight for survival. Nothing could have prepared billionaire explorer Joseph Thornton and washed up archaeologist Christopher "Colt" McKinnon for the terrifying prehistoric creatures that wait for them on JURASSIC ISLAND!

Video Night


Adam Cesare - 2013
    Life is good. But he has no idea that an alien life form has infected his town, a creature that overtakes and transforms its host.It could be inside anyone: a classmate, a pizza delivery man, even the girl next door. When Billy’s weekly movie night is crashed by this otherworldly menace, he and his best friend and their dates will have to summon their courage and call upon all their horror movie knowledge if they’re going to make it through Video Night alive.

Alien³


Alan Dean Foster - 1992
    Abandoned hulks of machinery rust in the colorless landscape. Dark, oily seas beat against a jagged black shore. And the remnants of a reentry space vehicle crash into the rough waves. In it sleeps Ripley, a woman who has battled the enemy twice. It killed her whole crew the first time. The second time, it slaughtered a spaceload of death-dealing Marines. Now on this prison planet that houses only a horde of defiant, captive men, she will have to fight the ultimate alien horror one more time.

Apocalypse Machine


Jeremy Robinson - 2016
     A chain of subglacial volcanoes erupt in Iceland. The melting ice floods the countryside. Poisonous gas descends on Scotland. A tsunami devastates the Norwegian coastline. An ash cloud rises into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun across Europe, ushering in a new Ice Age. Dozens of nuclear power plants, flooded by ocean water, experience meltdowns. Millions perish. Many more are displaced. All on the first day. On the second day, a series of earthquakes moving in a straight line, reveal the presence of something massive, walking across the landscape. Concealed by a thick, radioactive ash cloud, the ‘aberration’ heads west, toward Russia. Abraham Wright, a science writer for Modern Scientist, who wants nothing more than to be reunited with his family, finds himself at the center of the United States’ response to the crisis. Under his new title as Assistant Science Advisor to the President, Wright is sent to Europe with a team of Army Rangers, where he uncovers the truth about the ancient behemoth laying waste to the world: there have been five mass extinctions on planet Earth, and the aberration has been present at each. On the third day, the world fights back. And loses. Separated from his family by continents and oceans ravaged by countless disasters and populated by strange new life, Wright struggles to survive in an evolving world. Hoping to uncover the key to mankind’s redemption, he fights for answers, and to reach his loved ones—before the human race’s extinction. THE APOCALYPSE MACHINE WILL FINISH IT. Jeremy Robinson returns to the Kaiju Thriller genre he popularized with the largest Kaiju to ever appear in fiction: the Apocalypse Machine. Bursting with all the epic action, desperate struggle and complex characters that readers have come to expect, Robinson takes the world to the brink once more, pitting humanity against the greatest threat he has yet to conjure, and asking the question: Does humanity deserve to inherit the Earth, or is our time up?

Floating Dragon


Peter Straub - 1982
    The hideous, unstoppable creation of man's power gone mad.The other is not natural at all. And it makes the first look like a child's play.

What Lurks Beneath


Ryan Lockwood - 2015
    To hunt. To devour. To kill.The first attack occurrs in the underwater caverns of the Bahamas. Two professional divers exploring the unknown. A monstrous flesh-ripping predator they never see coming.Now the attacks are coming closer and closer to shore. A sun-soaked playground for sea-loving tourists. A human feasting ground for whatever lurks beneath.Now, in a desperate race against time, Eric Watson, an expert on remote control underwater vehicles, and marine biologist Valerie Martell, must identify a savage new species of killer—and piece together one of nature’s most horrific mysteries. But the most terrifying discovery of all waits for Val and her team at the bottom of the sea. A discovery too shocking, to comprehend.Because up till now, this creature existed only in mankind’s darkest nightmares. Not anymore.

The Extinct - A Novel of Prehistoric Terror


Shigeru Brody - 2019
     On the verge of entering adulthood, restless college student Eric Holden is told the heartbreaking news: his father has been killed in India. A mysterious guide who was with his father in his last moments tells Eric that the murderer is an unknown animal, one that is responsible for dozens of deaths in the region. He asks Eric to join him in the hunt for the beast and to find out what really happened to his father. Eric agrees and joins the team of hunters sent to find the creature. In a remote, forgotten region of the continent, he encounters the full darkness and violence of nature; and the tables are turned quickly as the mysterious beast is not what it seems. Soon, the hunters will become the hunted...

Constance


Matthew FitzSimmons - 2021
    For the wealthy, cheating death is the ultimate luxury. To anticloning militants, it’s an abomination against nature. For young Constance “Con” D’Arcy, who was gifted her own clone by her late aunt, it’s terrifying.After a routine monthly upload of her consciousness—stored for that inevitable transition—something goes wrong. When Con wakes up in the clinic, it’s eighteen months later. Her recent memories are missing. Her original, she’s told, is dead. If that’s true, what does that make her?The secrets of Con’s disorienting new life are buried deep. So are those of how and why she died. To uncover the truth, Con is retracing the last days she can recall, crossing paths with a detective who’s just as curious. On the run, she needs someone she can trust. Because only one thing has become clear: Con is being marked for murder—all over again.

White Shark


Peter Benchley - 1994
    But even Simon doesn't know that a far deadlier creature is about to come out of the deep and threaten everything he cares for. A creature whose malevolence is unthinkable. Whose need to feed is insatiable. And whose relentless hunt for prey is unstoppable.Twenty years after his huge bestseller Jaws, the master of the deep has done it again, letting loose a chilling new predator that only he could create. Drawing on his singular knowledge of the sea, science, and history, Peter Benchley masterfully spins a suspense-filled novel that hits you on a primal level, makes your heart pound, and leaves your blood running cold.White Shark is Peter Benchley at his best. Read it at your own risk.

The Loop


Jeremy Robert Johnson - 2020
    When an inexplicable outbreak rapidly develops, this idyllic town becomes the epicenter of an epidemic of violence as the teenaged children of several executives from the local biotech firm become ill and aggressively murderous. Suddenly the town is on edge, and Lucy and her friends must do everything it takes just to fight through the night.

Infinite


Brian Freeman - 2021
    Dylan initially chalks it up to trauma, but that changes when he runs into a psychiatrist who claims he’s her patient. She says he has been undergoing a unique hypnotherapy treatment built on the idea that with every choice, he creates an infinite number of parallel universes.Now those parallel universes are unlocked—and Dylan’s doppelgänger has staked a claim to his world. Can Dylan use these alternate realities to get a second chance at the life that was stolen from him? Or will he lose himself…to himself?

The Unnoticeables


Robert Brockway - 2015
    But they do watch over us. They watch our lives unfold, analyzing us for repeating patterns and redundancies. When they find them, the angels simplify those patterns, they remove the redundancies, and the problem that is you gets solved.Carey doesn’t much like that idea. As a punk living in New York City, 1977, Carey is sick and tired of watching the strange kids with the unnoticeable faces abduct his friends. He doesn’t care about the rumors of tarmonsters in the sewers, or unkillable psychopaths invading the punk scene—all he wants is drink cheap beer and dispense asskickings.Kaitlyn isn’t sure what she’s doing with her life. She came to Hollywood in 2013 to be a stunt woman, but last night a former teen heartthrob tried to eat her, her best friend has just gone missing, and there’s an angel outside her apartment.Whatever she plans on doing with her life, it should probably happen in the few remaining minutes she has left of it.There are angels. There are demons. They are the same thing. It’s up to Carey and Kaitlyn to stop them. The survival of the human race is in their hands.We are, all of us, well and truly screwed.