Poisoned Pen Press has announced The Burn Line, a new horror novel from Jonathan Sims, the writer, performer, and games designer behind the acclaimed horror podcast The Magnus Archives. The book arrives in trade paperback on August 25, 2026, and blends creature-feature dread with sharp class-warfare satire in a story set beneath the streets of London.

When five strangers are trapped aboard a stalled London Underground train, they emerge on the surface with no memory of what happened in the dark — but whatever stalked them underground has followed them back into the city. As the group works to reconstruct the stolen memories, they uncover a predatory system built to consume the vulnerable in service of the powerful. Sims brings the same slow-burn creeping dread that defined The Magnus Archives to the page, and the result has already drawn strong praise from the horror fiction community.

“Jonathan Sims breathes life into a found family worth rooting for and a mysterious menace worth losing sleep over,” said Brian McAuley, the USA Today bestselling author of Breathe In, Bleed Out. Bitter Karella, author of Moonflow, called it a blend of “Kind Hearts and Coronets meets The Midnight Meat Train.”

The Burn Line arrives in trade paperback on August 25, 2026