Alien: Cult

by Gavin G. Smith

An FBI agent on the trail of a brutal serial killer gets caught in the web of a Xenomorph-worshipping religion in this thrilling murder mystery twist on the Alien universe, for fans of Scott Sigler’s Phalanx and Alex White’s Cold Forge.

In the affluent, technocratic Alexandria Colony, people are disappearing. And witnesses are dying in grisly, mysterious ways—it all reeks of Xenomorphs. At a loss, the Hume City police call in Special Agent Tyler Matterton to solve what they can’t. Tyler is a rising star in the FBI’s Esoteric Crime Unit, investigating crimes involving exotic tech or first contact situations—the weird murders.

With the local police department baffled, Tyler and his synthetic partner Serena are set on the case, tracking the killer through the underbelly of Hume City only to find themselves in the middle of something much larger and more horrifying than they possibly imagined. There is a cult at the heart of the Alexandria Colony, and it will stop at nothing to serve its Goddess.

In this latest original novel, discover the world of Alien as you’ve never seen it before. Veteran sci-fi author Gavin G. Smith’s deliciously twisted crime thriller is a terrifying thrill ride sure to hook readers from the first page to the last.

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Aliens

416 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2025

About the author

Gavin Smith was born in Dundee in the same year that Iron Butterfly recorded Inna-Gadda-da-Vida. He has also lived in Camberley, Hayling Island, Portsmouth, Hull, Leamington Spa and is currently living a near feral existence in Leicester (if you see him in the streets he will write science fiction for sweeties). Anyone who has been to any of these places will understand why his fiction is like it is.

He has a degree in writing for film and a Masters in medieval history. Veteran is his first novel but he is patiently waiting for one of the 2.5 scripts that have been optioned to be turned into films.

He likes to travel and dive when he can afford it and in his free time he enjoys getting the s**t kicked out of him whilst practicing Silat. He is hoping that his books do well so he can buy a motorbike.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you start this novel with an FBI agent and Serena, his synth companion, chasing a serial killer an enhanced bio-engineered human there is very little in the way of an ordinary alien novel. Weyland- Yutani and the failed Prometeus mission get mentioned.
The Federal agents chase down their culprit who is partially human and partially bio-engineered into a variation of something human. But catching this killer does not answer all questions.
Tyler & Serena travel to one of the border colonies where they visit a world where big cooperation runs beef cattle and there is a church for people who alter their humanity for something better?
It is here the conspiracy becomes clear and of course Weyland-Yutani is involved and the godess from this church is actually an old aquintance whose offspring the facehuggers clearly put this book into the Alien universe.

It is a well written book that feels very scifi and police novel and on the basis of other reviews I expected something very different. But when the last 100 pages start the book shifts gear and you get everything you want from a book advertised like this.

Well worth readingtime and different enough to be very enjoyable. An original addition to the world of Aliens.

[Kev · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll start off by saying that this book has absolutely nothing to do with Xenomorphs and is just very VERY slightly linked to the Prometheus/black goo storyline so I feel like I really was mis-sold on buying this book and is a really bad case of false advertising.

That being said, I stuck with it anyway and I’ve got to say that although this definitely should not be under the ‘Alien’ label this was a very exciting scifi thriller that I actually thoroughly enjoyed. The characters were good, the story was atmospheric, fast paced and original and was action packed from the start.

I personally think this was written with no thought of it being an Alien book at all and then just before publishing they stuck in a few mentions of Weyland Yutani etc in it (literally twice!) to sell it as part of the franchise which is very naughty but I did actually enjoy it regardless and would definitely read another book by this author in the future.

So if you’re thinking of reading this then do not expect anything Alien related and you should enjoy it.

[Michael Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my review of Alien: Perfect Organisms, I applauded Shaun Hamill for finding a fresh and unique hook into such a well-known and well-trodden universe. Hamill gave readers a rich, character-first take that viewed xenomorphs through the lens of religiosity and put the titular alien species in the backseat for much of the narrative. Titan Books’s second Alien offering of 2025, Gavin G. Smith’s Cult, tacks a similar course while proving to be a completely different beast altogether.

As the title implies, Alien: Cult is all about religious nuttery in a galaxy of Engineers, black goo, facehuggers, and an ultimate race of killer bugs. FBI Agent Tyler Matterhorn and his artificial person partner Serena are investigating a missing persons case on a colony world that quickly puts them at odds with serial killer Darius Snell. The discovery of Snell kicks open the door to a wider conspiracy of a cult of Engineer-worshipping genehackers who are modifying themselves to take on the appearance of the bald, alabaster-skinned giants introduced in Prometheus.

Smith smartly inverts expectations of what an Alien book can be in a few clever ways. As with Perfect Organisms, the infamous xenomorphs are held back until the very end, and the Engineers seen throughout Cult aren’t really the Space Jockeys of the films but good, old fashioned human wannabes. Gone, too, is the customary grungy, industrial feel. For the first third of Smith’s book, Cult reads more like a riff on Blade Runner, with its bustling, neon-lit criminal underworld, impoverished streets, and illegal biohacking dens. Given the supposed Easter egg-level connections between the two properties, this makes sense and the shiny cyberpunk ethos Smith cultivates in the book’s opening chapters immediately piqued my interest for what was to come.

And then Smith pulls the rug out from under readers, taking Matterhorn’s investigation, and the Alien franchise as a whole, to a completely different world and genre – the Western.

Yes, dear readers, Alien: Cult is a dusty, sci-fi oater. The action shifts to the sparsely populated Steer City, on a colony world devoted to livestock farming and the headquarters of the Church of Biological Transcendence, of which Snell was a member and whose congregants bear an uncanny resemblance and similar modifications to. Embattled Marshall Cass Stock finds herself squaring off against corrupt Big Agriculture, drunken violent cowboys, and a sniveling deputy who wants her job. Cult expert Matterhorn is the fish out of water here, in more ways than one.

The melding of genre tropes works incredibly well, and Smith lays up a few set pieces unlike anything I’ve seen in previous Alien entries. We get a farmhouse siege for one, and an action-packed finale set amidst a cattle run through the city in the middle of a violent dust storm. Filtering the Alien series through the Western genre makes for a welcome change of pace and is exactly the kind of creativity I’m looking for in an Alien book these days after so many decades of Colonial Marines same-old, same-old. After so many too-familiar riffs on ground already covered in the movies, Cult is a breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, Cult suffers from an anticlimactic ending that left me wishing for just a few extra pages to flesh things out a little bit further and provide a deeper resolution. Instead, we get an abrupt and transparently obvious zinger in the form of the Alien franchises’s version of the hand rising from the grave. I wish there’d been a bit more falling action and some degree of resolution before Smith hightailed it out of Dodge. Cult also has more than its fair share of editorial mishaps and proofreading errors, and certainly more than should be expected of a major publisher. The number of misplaced commas, transposed or repeated words, and typos found in the finished copy is galling.

If one can overlook all the typographical errors and poor proofreading, the worldbuilding Smith puts into Cult is worthwhile and nicely differentiated from typical Alien stories. Yes, underpinning it all is the future conservatives want, with so much of humanity reduced to chattel for corporate overlords and unwitting test subjects of bioweapons experiments, and workers kept not only poor but at odds with one another to deflect their attention away from who the real villains are. Smith’s portrait of law enforcement in late-stage capitalism is certainly dire, and somehow even more depressing than the systemic racism our current legal system revolves around, yet it certainly feels like the natural evolution of our current hellscape. Anybody with even a passing familiarity with the Alien universe and a lick of common sense won’t find themselves too surprised at who’s all behind the machinations behind the Church of Biological Transcendence, but Smith’s explorations of body modifications, transhumanism, and genetic engineering, and his fresh set dressings to stage it all against, certainly make for stellar focal points.

[user48573452 · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

Man I had such high hopes for this novel and could not have been anymore wrong!

In short, it has nothing to do with Xenos like the synopsis mentions. It isn't an 'Alien Cult' at all... it is a 'Black Goo Cult'

After this and Perfect Orgaisms, it is clear that Titan are trying to tie together the old with the new. Please just shove all this 'Black Goo' crap up your asses... this franchise is well and truly dead IMO

[Hazel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have never in my whole life read a book with so many typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

[Brett Chapman-richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel take on the franchise

A really novel and interesting take on the franchise. Taking one star off because the ending was incredibly abrupt, and I'd have loved to read more about the aftermath!

[Thomas Norford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superior Aliens novel which regardless of the franchise, works as an excellent cyberpunk potboiler crossed with a sci-fi western. The world building and characterisation are great, and the prose clips along nicely.

I've read a lot of the Alien novels and many of them fail because they throw wave after wave of xenomorphs at the reader, deadening their impact completely. This novel takes a much more original approach.

[Elliot Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read every alien novel so far from the bizarre to the brilliant I always love a fresh take on the universe outside of the more common plots we see repeated in alien. it starts with some xeno meets blade runner vibes and it takes it to more of a western, i'm more of a fan of the former, however, i did enjoy my time with this book. Reminds me of some of the original alien novels where it brushes the alien franchise but has it's own story to tell.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was quite looking forward to this. Part 1 was engaging, I loved the atmosphere, gritty and dark. Blade Runner esque. The imagery was great. Part 2 a big change of scenery, slowed down a little. I enjoyed the references to Prometheus and Covenant. I thought there would be another change of scenery but it kind of just stayed here and throughout Part 3. I enjoyed the detective/mystery style. All in all an enjoyable read but I expected a little more.

However, my biggest gripe with this was the unbelievable amount of grammar errors. I don't know if this was properly edited or proof-read, but there are many, the most I have encountered in any book. I read the eBook version. I could accept a few but it just took me out of the story every time I came across another. Probably not the authors fault, more so with whoever edited this.

2.75/5

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

The word that comes to mind for this novel is careless. Full of mistakes and a climax that doesn't make any logical sense. It's like the author forgot how facehuggers work.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

could not finish due to the Grammer mistakes.

[Chris The Lizard from Planet X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review: Alien: Cult by Gavin G. Smith

Gavin G. Smith’s Alien: Cult is a striking and unconventional entry in the long-running Alien franchise—one that deliberately turns away from colonial marines and battlefield carnage to explore something more insidious: belief. Blending crime noir, political intrigue, and cosmic horror, the novel reframes the xenomorph not merely as a perfect organism, but as an object of worship, fear, and ideological manipulation.

A Different Kind of Alien Story

At its core, Alien: Cult is structured like a crime thriller. The novel follows FBI Special Agent Tyler Matterton, a weary, methodical investigator dispatched to the Alexandria Colony to track down a serial killer whose murders defy easy explanation. Accompanying him is a synthetic partner, whose presence adds a subtle but constant tension—both emotional and philosophical—to the investigation. From the outset, the story feels grounded, procedural, and grimly human, despite its futuristic setting.

This grounding is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Smith leans heavily into investigative detail: interviews, forensic analysis, political pressures, and jurisdictional conflicts all play major roles. The slow-burn pacing mirrors classic detective fiction, allowing unease to accumulate gradually rather than relying on immediate shocks. When the horror finally surfaces, it feels earned—and deeply disturbing.

The Cult and the “Goddess”

As Matterton digs deeper, the murders reveal connections to a secretive cult devoted to a so-called “Goddess”—a divine figure whose true nature will be immediately recognizable to fans of the franchise. Rather than portraying xenomorphs solely as monsters unleashed by corporate greed or military hubris, Alien: Cult explores how humans might rationalize, mythologize, and even revere such creatures.

This religious framing is where the novel truly distinguishes itself. Smith interrogates the psychology of belief in a universe defined by corporate exploitation, colonial isolation, and existential dread. The cult is not portrayed as cartoonishly evil; instead, its members are frightening precisely because their logic is coherent within their worldview. In a galaxy where life is cheap and suffering is normalized, the idea of surrendering to a higher, terrifying order begins to make a twisted kind of sense.

Politics, Power, and Control

The Alexandria Colony itself is vividly realized—a pressure-cooker environment shaped by bureaucracy, economic desperation, and corporate indifference. Smith uses the setting to explore how power functions in the Alien universe beyond Weyland-Yutani’s boardrooms. Law enforcement agencies, colonial administrators, and shadowy interest groups all exert influence, often at cross purposes. Matterton is constantly constrained by politics, making his investigation feel claustrophobic and frustrating in ways that echo real-world crime fiction.

This emphasis on systems—political, religious, institutional—adds thematic depth. The novel suggests that xenomorphs are not the only “perfect organisms” at work; belief systems and power structures can be just as adaptive, predatory, and lethal.

Characters and Tone

Tyler Matterton is a compelling protagonist: cynical but not hollow, driven yet visibly worn down by years of confronting human cruelty. His synthetic partner serves as both foil and mirror, raising quiet questions about agency, empathy, and what it truly means to be human in a universe that commodifies life. Their dynamic is restrained rather than sentimental, fitting the novel’s bleak tone.

Smith’s prose is sharp and unsparing. Violence, when it occurs, is described with clinical precision rather than indulgence, reinforcing the horror rather than sensationalizing it. The atmosphere is relentlessly oppressive, steeped in paranoia and moral decay, making the eventual revelations feel both shocking and inevitable.

A Worthy, Thought-Provoking Entry

Alien: Cult will not satisfy readers looking for pulse-pounding action or extended xenomorph battles. Instead, it offers something rarer within licensed science fiction: a thoughtful expansion of the universe’s philosophical and cultural dimensions. By focusing on religion, ideology, and investigation, Gavin G. Smith demonstrates how the Alien mythos can support stories far beyond survival horror.

For fans of the franchise who appreciate Alien as a cosmic horror story about humanity’s insignificance—and for readers who enjoy dark crime fiction with speculative depth—Alien: Cult is a compelling, unsettling, and memorable read. It reminds us that the most terrifying thing in the Alien universe is not just the monster in the dark, but the human desire to kneel before it.

[Gergely · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book may have been kinda-sorta good-ish in the nineties, when Crichton's Jurassic Park brought genetic engineering in as the new boogieman to replace nuclear power.

It may have been acceptable (after a few drinks) around 2020 or so, when COVID hit, and genetic manipulation again was front and center.

Now, it's just a sad failure. Which is unfortunate, because it could have been good. I think the main problem was that the writer wanted too much, too many themes and storylines, and it all fell apart under its own weight. Also, the fact that most of the characters are shallow archetypes (at best), and rather unlikeable, interchangeable, and forgettable, does not do the book any favors.

So, a few issues specifically:
- Cultist wanting to genetically modify themselves to Prometheus/Covenant-style Engineers. Yeah, right. How exactly know they how they look, since neither Prometheus, nor Covenant returned?
- If they are Engineer-wannabes, why do they modify themselves with xenomorph-imitation inner jaws?
- Why is the FBI agent the most inept, incompetent, useless waste of flesh pining for his android partner? And yeah, that whole relationship was creepy as hell due to the power imbalance ... and the very, very awkward writing.
- Why is Biotechnica even more incompetent and shortsighted than WY in the Alien:Earth series? Sure, having your deniable research facility placed in a faraway hick planet without competent oversight, dedicated damage control assets, or reliable ways of getting the vital research data off-planet?
- Why mention hypersleep dreaming and hint at xenomorph psychic shenanigans, when the story does not do anything with the plot point?

And so on. Overall, a very, very disappointing book, that fails even in comparison to the Steve/Stephanie Perry trilogy from the early 90s....

[Edward Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alien: Cult is an intense, atmospheric addition to the Alien universe that completely exceeded my expectations. It blends the franchise’s signature horror with a chilling exploration of fanaticism and survival, creating a story that feels both terrifying and thought-provoking. The concept of a cult worshipping the xenomorphs is brilliant—and horrifying—and the execution is flawless. Even though this has been seen before in early Dark Horse comics, the extent we see here is terrifying.

The pacing is tight, the tension never lets up, and the characters are compelling in their desperation and moral ambiguity. Every twist feels earned, and the sense of dread builds until the final pages leave you breathless. It’s not just a creature feature; it’s a psychological descent into obsession and fear, all wrapped in the bleak beauty of the Alien mythos. It's more of a noir love-letter to the Alien Universe than a true Alien novel. If this is the direction they want to take a portion of the fiction to, than i am all for it.

If you love the franchise or crave dark, unsettling sci-fi, this is a must-read. It’s bold, brutal, and unforgettable—a perfect 5-star experience.

[Taylor Stumpf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, but unfortunately, the flaws were impossible to ignore. Firstly, this book desperately needs an editor. There were multiple pages where “their” was used in place of “there”. There were also many sentences with glaringly obvious grammar and punctuation errors and words in the incorrect order. For example, a sentence like “He was going to the store” would appear as “He was going was to the store.” You can still get the meaning, but as a reader, it felt like an insult that such mistakes would be so ubiquitous. Lastly, there was little to no xenomorph action in the story aside from some vague references you’d only get if you had seen the Alien movies. The first part of the book was filled with promise, but the second and third parts, especially the last chapter, were an absolute mess. “Alien: Cult” is one of the weakest contributions to the xenoverse and a definite waste of potential. You won’t miss anything important by skipping this installation.

[Lester B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Alien: Cult delivers a fresh, chilling twist to the Alien universe. Gavin G. Smith blends crime thriller and sci-fi horror flawlessly, creating a story that is as tense as it is addictive. Special Agent Tyler Matterton is a fantastic lead—smart, flawed, and relentless—as he dives into a case filled with dread, mystery, and shocking twists. The world-building is rich, the suspense is razor-sharp, and the Xenomorph-worshipping cult is terrifying in the best way. A page-turner from start to finish.”

[Maya Malice · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a fine story I guess but not the alien book its billed as. We don't see xeno's in the normal sense at all, just face huggers and the Queen, and we don't see either of those until the last 30 pages. This is much more about the engineers from Prometheus, which the cult worships. Great if you think that movie is good I guess...

[Thomas Hobbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very slow at first 300 pgs. Reading like a NCIS TV show and combination western. With corrupt politicians and judge even a deputy. It didn't get interesting until 300 pages in when the author finally introduced the egg pods and the queen Goddess. Hope this review helps future readers of this book.

[BookishBexx&theCats · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars because even though the story and characters were great the book needed better editing. Many instances of the wrong form of there/their, run on sentences and grammatical errors ruined some of the reading experience.

[Chris Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barely an Alien book at all. Yes there were some references to W-Y and the Engineers, but you wouldn’t know it was an Alien book until literally the last 20 of 400 pages. And I swear if I read the phrase “was stood” one more time… ugh.

[Alex Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

fell short on the ending.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really surprising directions in this one. I liked the marshal a lot.

[Mmvarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will slow applaud this book for being completely unique. If you’re tired of reading the same things happening in Alien books, read this one. No airlocks.