Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Black Star Black Sun | 2015 | Rich Hawkins | Buy |
| 2 | Black Flower Butterfly | 2018 | Rich Hawkins | Buy |
| 3 | Maniac Gods | 2018 | Rich Hawkins | Buy |
| 4 | The Cold | 2019 | Rich Hawkins | Buy |
Rich Hawkins’s standalone novels are the Lovecraftian side of his catalog, a group of four books that bring cosmic horror to the English countryside outside the post-apocalyptic framework of The Last Plague series. Black Star, Black Sun (2015) appeared in his debut year alongside the first Last Plague book, establishing the dual mode he would work in across his career.
Black Star, Black Sun is set in Somerset and follows a man returning to his hometown after his wife’s disappearance, finding the familiar landscape infected by something old and impossible. Hawkins acknowledged it as a tribute to Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell, the British horror writer whose influence on English weird fiction runs through much of Hawkins’s work. Maniac Gods (2018) and Black Flower Butterfly (2018) both continued in this territory, with Maniac Gods centering on a father’s desperate search through a village in the grip of a cult invoking Lovecraftian entities.
The Cold (2019) is the final standalone in this phase of his output, and the four books together represent a distinct strand of his work alongside the more explicitly genre-coded creature horror of his series.