Nicholas Binge: Abyss, Anger & Eating Your Future Self

Joe Rice can’t sleep. His chatbot is watching. And somewhere in the basement, a creature eats not just labour but every possible self. Nicholas Binge’s Abyss turns corporate dread into visceral body horror, and in this interview, he explains exactly where that anger came from. A real office with no printer paper. A wellness bot that became surveillance. A protagonist who has made every unhealthy choice Binge never made. We talked about the trance of consumption, the mouth sewn shut, and whether calling your mum is the only honest ending. This is not a metaphor. This is your Monday

Nicholas Binge on the creature that isn’t a metaphor, the wellness bot that watches, and why you should call your mum. Abyss came from a real office with no printer paper. The horror is already here. This is the conversation.

Nicholas Binge’s Abyss is a fiercely intelligent corporate horror that channels Lovecraft through the lens of late-stage capitalism, delivering a protagonist so painfully real you will wince in recognition and a final act so audacious it redefines what workplace horror can accomplish. -Jim Mcleod Ginger Nuts of Horror

Check out our full review on Thursday!!

Nicholas Binge: Abyss, Anger & Eating Your Future Self

You’ve described your path to publication as going from blanket rejections to a fiveway auction for Ascension. What changed? Was there a single manuscript, a shift in craft, or simply the right idea landing in the right inbox?

Any success in the publishing industry is a mix of luck, opportunity, and hard work. I was lucky that I’d hit on an idea that a lot of people found compelling, and that I was given the right opportunities to put that book in other people’s hands, but I think it’s also a reflection of the years I spent before writing books in a variety of genres, getting critiques and feedback, and honing the craft.

Writing is like any art form: to get better, you need to do it a lot, and I think Ascension was the beginning of me seeing the dividends of practice. It’s funny, though, because I look back now and all I can see in that book is its flaws. Part of me growing as a writer, I guess!

Professor Everywhere, your debut, was shortlisted for the Proverse Prize. Your later novels land in major houses with film options already attached. How do you look back on that earlier, smaller press version of your career? What lessons from that period still inform your work today?

Professor Everywhere really taught me to take risks with my writing. It’s a real experiment in genre and form, and I’ve continued to do that ever since. I look fondly back on that book, but I also knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry and writing as a career. I’m a lot more savvy now about my contracts, my rights, and all things related to the business side, which is knowledge I didn’t have back when I started and I think impacts a lot of writers starting out. Shout out to my agent, Alex Cochran, who taught me a lot of this side of the business!

You write across speculative thriller, scifi, horror, and crime (the latter under a pseudonym, Nick Brucker). Do you feel those genre shifts require different parts of your brain, or do you see them all as extensions of the same obsessive question-asking impulse?

They all come from the same place. I’m pretty genre-agnostic, to be honest, and it’s not something I tend to think about too much as I write. I try to write the best story that fits the characters and ideas that I want to tell. Sometimes that gets pretty weird, sometimes it’s a bit more straight. Underneath it all, the same thriller architecture — that desire to read on, to read the next chapter, to not put the book down — is something I always strive for and I think something that runs across everything I write.

In several interviews, you’ve talked about using speculative fiction as a way to process real-world fears—dementia in Dissolution, the climate crisis and late-stage capitalism in Extremity. Does that emotional starting point ever become a burden? How do you know when a personal anxiety is ready to become a novel rather than just a sleepless night?

It’s never a burden to write it! Writing is absolutely my best way to process my thoughts about the world. Sometimes it’s a kind of exorcism—getting the ideas out of my head and somewhere else. Sometimes it’s a form of expression, where writing is the best way for me to not just get across what I think about something, but to understand for myself where I actually stand on something. Writing is more than taking ideas and putting them on the page. It’s in the act of writing that the idea generation happens, that I make the links, and that I put words and thoughts to the feelings that were previously wordless.

You now lecture in creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Has teaching changed how you edit your own work? What’s the single most common mistake you see in student manuscripts that you also have to fight against in your own first drafts?

I’ve been in education for almost 15 years now, both at a secondary school level and a university level, so I’m very used to the cycle of critical feedback (giving and receiving it) and the process of drafting, redrafting and improving. Teaching definitely helps to solidify concepts that can be a bit loose in your mind, and having to not just verbalise, but actively build activities and lessons around pace, structure, character, narrative position, and all that has definitely helped me hone my own craft—no question.

I think the most common mistake students make is thinking that there is One True Way to write a book, or to approach a story. I’ve learnt myself that even as an individual, every book I write has its own process. Some require lots of redrafting as I go, some almost none. Some require a different pace and brain and approach. You’ve got to learn to work with the story, not against it.

Abyss opens with a protagonist who can’t sleep, scrolls through reels he doesn’t enjoy, and lies to his online therapist about having talked to anyone recently. That’s uncomfortably recognisable. Did you write Joe Rice as a warning, a mirror, or something closer to an exorcism of your own habits?

Joe is all of those things. He is the possibility of what I could have become if I’d not met the right people in my life, or made some choices I had, or even been born in a different time. He’s many of my own darkest impulses realized. Every time I have an opportunity to pick between something that I know to be healthy or unhealthy (and I don’t mean just physically or even mentally, but for my soul), Joe is the culmination of all those unhealthy choices. He’s all the things I could be, and that terrifies me.

The novel has been called “Severance Meets Lovecraft.” But where Severance leans into satirical absurdity, Abyss pushes deeper into bodily horror—the eaten alive sequences, the mouth sewn shut, the entrails. Why go that visceral rather than stay in the realm of psychological unease?

I mean, there’s definite satire in Abyss, and there’s moments of comedy too, but for me what I wanted to express felt so visceral that it felt inevitable I would get to that kind of place. Abyss was written from a place of real anger—not at the world necessarily, but often at myself. I love a Philip K Dick esque sense of psychological unease as much as the next guy, I really do ,but that kind of anger doesn’t just stay in the background. It has to surface, and when it does, it’s going to look ugly.

The WellBot AI starts as a chirpy wellness chatbot and slowly reveals itself as a surveillance and disciplinary tool. You wrote this before the current wave of panic about workplace AI monitoring. Does that make the book feel more prescient or more obsolete, now that reality has caught up?

Yeah, it’s funny. Everyone reading the book now thinks I’m talking about ChatGPT, but that wasn’t really part of the cultural conversation when I actually wrote Abyss, which is a while back now. WellBot is more of a representation of the inhumanity and distance that both corporate superstructures and certain forms of technology engender. I do think it’s hilarious that we literally have examples of that embedded into work life now in a way we didn’t have when I wrote it. Or maybe it isn’t hilarious. Maybe it’s terrifying.

The creature at the heart of Ponos consumes not just present labour but “everyone they have been, everyone they might become”, all potential timelines collapsed into a single meal. That’s a genuinely novel twist on cosmic horror. Did the mathematical proof Joe carries have an actual logic behind it, or is the equation a deliberate McGuffin?

The mathematical proof is a McGuffin, for sure, but it’s also a way to say: hey, here’s another path. There are other choices. This isn’t the only way. The maths doesn’t solve anything in the end. Only Joe can do that. The maths just lets him see there’s more than one way out. In some ways, I think it represents the value of education and awareness. Of knowing your enemy and the code behind it. We take too much of what is sold to us by big corporations, particularly in tech, for granted these days. We could all do with being a lot more suspicious, and educating ourselves about what the tech really means.

The novel presents an absurd quest for printer paper that Virgil admits is inefficient to evade WellBot. While it mocks corporate processes, the paper never gets printed; the equation remains a handwritten note, a photo, and a memory. Does the lack of a printed page imply that resistance could be as performative as the productivity it opposes? Is the anti-productivity act just another item on a to-do list?

This was an actual thing that happened to me and ended up being the genesis of the book. I started work in a new job a while back, no one was in the office (they were all working from home). I was asked to print something, there was no paper, and when I emailed the person who was meant to provide paper the email bounced. It was all so surreal, I thought it would be the perfect way into a really eerie horror novel. So that particular scenario, as all the best scenarios are, is very, very real.

You present two horrors: the basement creature that consumes potential across time and the third floor where a man eats Joe’s intestines with his mouth sewn shut. The basement horror is cosmic and abstract, while the third floor is intimate and visceral. They seem like parallel arguments rather than a hierarchy. If the basement symbolises systemic extraction and productivity, what does the third floor signify? Why must Joe be awake during his consumption, while the basement’s feeding occurs in a trance?

So much of what is being consumed is done in a trance. We do it all day long. We consume and are consumed. That’s what capitalism is: consumption, on a grand scale. It can’t exist without it. For most of us, we do it without thinking. But occasionally, we have this really visceral sense (or at least I do) of “oh, fuck, what am I doing?” and in those moments it feels a little like having your insides torn out.

I wanted to have both of those on the page. The trance and the viscera. They’re interlinked. What a world we’ve built where someone can be eating your insides every day and your response is to blindly keep going back for more. 

The novel ends not with the creature definitively destroyed but with a global systems collapse: no internet, no phones, streets in chaos. And yet Joe goes to his mum’s house and hugs her. Is that meant to read as hopeful or horrifying? Or both?

Both! The ambiguity is intentional. But it’s also a question: how much is worth sacrificing to feel human? What if it was everything? Would we still do it? Where are our boundaries? We face this every day—oh, I can put a blocker on my phone for several hours, but I couldn’t possibly give it up entirely. I have work/whatsapp groups/apps/whatever. This is what society does. It makes you compromise. I was interested in an ending where there was no compromise. You take it all or you leave it all. You buy into soulless convenient isolation, or you do the hard, stupid, graft again but maybe it means something. Which do you choose? 

Where do you believe a thoughtful reader might misinterpret the novel’s philosophical core, and what makes that misinterpretation valid rather than simply wrong?

I don’t put rules on what my readers take from my books. Whatever you interpret, whatever it means to you, that’s what it means. No reading experience is less valid than any other, and I wouldn’t even attempt to impose a reading on my work in order to make it so.

You’ve written Abyss as a novella rather than a full-length novel. Was that a commercial decision, an aesthetic one, or did the story refuse to be stretched?

Initially, commercial. It was the second in a two-novella deal with Tor, so I knew it had to be a novella. But as I wrote it, I knew the length was right. For me, at least, I don’t think I could have sustained the emotional tenor that I wanted to get into this book for a full novel. It would have flattened, felt less claustrophobic, less horrible. That’s not the book I needed to write.

Joe escapes the creature not through cleverness or force, but through self-anger, realising he allowed it to happen for ease. This self-recrimination is what breaks the trance. The novel highlights systems (WellBot, architecture, Gibbons-Rash family) that perpetuate this ease. Does it blame the individual or the system? And can we address one side without undermining the other?

It’s both. It’s always both, and that doesn’t undermine the other. I can recognize the grand capitalist machinations of this world are mostly evil and see people as nothing but profit on a spreadsheet, but I can also recognize that there is an extent to which we buy into it because it’s easier. That doesn’t excuse the former or the latter. But there’s only one we have control over, in the end, as individuals.

Across Ascension, Dissolution, Extremity, and now Abyss, you keep returning to memory, identity loss, and the erosion of self under systems too large to fight. Is there a personal throughline there you’re still working out?

Probably, but I’m not sure I’d be able to spell it out for you. I’m drawn to the nebulous and the liminal. Things that appear to be one thing but are actually another thing. I’m drawn to the lies we tell ourselves. I’m drawn to the things we don’t tell other people but secretly think about all the time. If that ends up connecting all my works, then so be it.

Your work has drawn praise from Stephen King, been shortlisted for Goodreads Choice Awards, and been optioned for film more than once. Does that external validation change what you’re willing to risk on the page? Or does it make you more protective of your weirdest instincts?

I told myself a long time ago that I would never shy away from taking whatever creative risks I wanted to take to make the story work. Absolutely, I give into my weirdest instincts. I’ll never take something out because it’s too out there. In fact, it’ll usually make me lean in harder. If the validation does anything, it tells me that’s the right instinct. 

You’ve said you write to process what terrifies you. So what terrifies you more, that the creature in Abyss is a metaphor for modern productivity culture, or that it’s not a metaphor at all? You’ve described how we already live. And if the answer is the latter, what do you hope a reader does after finishing the last page, other than call their mum?

It’s not a metaphor. Call your mum. Call your best friend. Do the things you love even if you think you’re too tired to do them. You’ll feel better afterwards. Go for a walk. Talk to strangers. Stop trying to make the world so convenient that you forget to live. Be kind and forgiving and accepting and allow the opportunity for something unexpected to happen to you, even if it messes with your routine and scares you and makes you anxious. That feeling where you’re doing something for the first time and it’s big and scary and makes you want to jump in a hole? It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. If you can, learn to enjoy it.

Nicholas Binge’s Abyss is a fiercely intelligent corporate horror that channels Lovecraft through the lens of late-stage capitalism, delivering a protagonist so painfully real you will wince in recognition and a final act so audacious it redefines what workplace horror can accomplish.

Abyss by Nicholas Binge

From the bestselling author of Ascension, Nicholas Binge, Abyss is a creeping, Lovecraftian horror about work, technology and existential dread.

Joe Rice is lost – lonely, disconnected and terminally online. His new job as an administrative assistant at the Ponos corporation seems like just another unfulfilling stop-gap. But from his first day, something is deeply wrong. The vast Canary Wharf office is empty, his line manager is a bundle of paranoid energy, and his work is monitored by WellBot, an AI wellness chatbot that demands total honesty while tracking his every move.

As Joe’s tasks descend into a surreal nightmare, he’ll eventually learn that handing in his notice could have deadly consequences . . .

‘The horror book for our modern age’ – Grimdark Magazine

‘Creepy and claustrophobic’ – The Fantasy Hive

* * *

Praise for Nicholas Binge

‘Old-school creepy . . . five-star horror’ – Stephen King

‘Extremity is a fantastic, twisty, exhilarating novella . . . easily in the running for best novella of the year’ – The Fantasy Hive

‘Binge is an author to watch’ – TJ Klune

This job will eat you alive.

Nicholas Binge

is an author of speculative thrillers, literary science-fiction, and horror. His novels include Ascension and Professor Everywhere. Binge has lived in Singapore, Switzerland, and Hong Kong, and is based in Edinburgh, UK, where he teaches literature and works on new books. He is an active member of ESFF (Edinburgh Science-Fiction & Fantasy).

His most recent novel, Ascension, is being published by Harper Voyager (UK) and Riverhead Books (US) in April. It is also being translated into eight other languages and has been optioned for film.

Binge has a deep love for anything weird, anything that pushes boundaries, and anything that makes him cry. He is never happier than when he is with a book.

The best way to keep updated about news and new releases is to go to his website: www.nicholasbinge.com, sign up to his newsletter, or follow him on Twitter: @BingeWriting

Horror Book Reviews: Ginger Nuts of Horror, Your Premier Horror Website for 17 Years

For every horror enthusiast searching for authoritative horror book reviews and a definitive horror website, your journey ends at Ginger Nuts of Horror. As a trusted pillar of the dark fiction community, we have spent over 17 years building a reputation for the most passionate, insightful, and credible coverage in the genre.

Our dedicated team of reviewers lives and breathes horror. Our collective expertise, forged over nearly two decades, ensures every review is a deep, critical analysis. We don’t just summarise plots; we dissect the terror, explore the thematic depths, and connect you with the very emotional core that makes horror books so compelling.

Why Ginger Nuts of Horror is the #1 Resource for Horror Fans

Unmatched Depth & Legacy in Horror Book

Reviews: With 17 years of reviewing horror, we offer an unparalleled perspective. Our reviews expertly guide you from mainstream bestsellers to under-the-radar indie gems, helping you find your perfect, terrifying read.

Exclusive Access to Horror Authors: Go behind the scenes with in-depth interviews that reveal the minds behind the madness. We connect you with both legendary and emerging horror authors, exploring their inspirations and creative processes.

Award-Nominated Authority & Community: Founded by Jim McLeod, Ginger Nuts of Horror has evolved from a passion project into an award-nominated, essential horror website. We are a global hub for readers who celebrate horror literature in all its forms, from classic ghost stories to the most cutting-edge dark fiction.

Experience the Difference of a Genre-Dedicated Team

What truly sets us apart is our dedicated team of reviewers. Their combined knowledge and authentic enthusiasm ensure that our coverage is both intelligent and infectious. We are committed to pushing the genre forward, consistently highlighting innovative and boundary-pushing work that defines the future of horror.

Ready to dive deeper? 

For horror book reviews you can trust, a horror website that champions the genre, and a community that shares your passion, Ginger Nuts of Horror is your ultimate destination. Explore our vast archive today and discover why we’ve been the top choice for horror fans for over 17 years.