The Middle Reaches, Cycle Three: The Flood

by L. Andrew Cooper

In The Middle Reaches, Cycle The Flood, new travelers collide with some familiar from earlier cycles as they all journey deeper into the horrors of Carcosa, exploring the roads to Lake Hali and the Palace of the King in Yellow. A lawsuit in the earthly realm over the ownership of the land between the two Acton Ways, the entryway to The Middle Reaches, manifests in Carcosa as a struggle among gods and ghosts, a struggle that could unleash an apocalyptic Flood.

229 pages, Paperback

Published May 27, 2025

About the author

L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. His current project, The Middle Reaches, is a serialized epic of weird horror and dark fantasy on Amazon Kindle Vella. His latest release, Records of the Hightower Massacre, an LGBTQ+ horror novella co-authored with Maeva Wunn, imagines a near-future dystopia where anti-queer hate runs a program to "correct" deviants. Stains of Atrocity, his newest collection of stories, goes to uncomfortable psychological and visceral extremes. His latest novel, Crazy Time, combines literary horror and dark fantasy in a contemporary quest to undo what may be a divine curse. Other published works include novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written more than 30 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives with his husband in North Hollywood, California. Find him at www.landrewcooper.com.

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things escalated very quickly in Cycle 3! We really got thrown headfirst into the chaos, but there's loads of really interesting things going on!

I'm really invested in Heather as a character. She might be my favourite outside of Max and Sheldon. Should she be? Maybe, maybe not, but I love what she's adding to the storyline. For a character who originally started out just looking for answers about a kid she used to babysit, she's really come into her own (and a lot of drama!)

I really liked meeting Lyanetha in this book, too! She's the most interesting of the three gods, I think, mostly because she refuses to take human avatars. I'm curious about the part she'll play in the final book of the series and if who she'll align with.

My eyeballs are still crossing a bit trying to remember who goes with what, where and when each character came from, and who follows who, but it's all so interesting that I don't find myself minding the confusion as much as I could.