Telelmim

Every night, eleven-year-old Marcus Goodman holds his family hostage with a bedtime story too big for a boy his age — an entire cosmology of warring gods, doomed generals, and a machine that could unmake the sun. Nobody takes it seriously. Not until the names in his story start matching people who are still alive.

Telelmim is a slow-burn, ensemble cosmic horror spanning a single household, a handful of classmates, and the ultra-wealthy families quietly preparing for something the rest of the world hasn't been told about yet. Just a widening web of ordinary people — some rich, some not, all afraid in different ways — trying to work out how much of what's coming they can still stop, and how much they were always going to be too late for.

If you like dread that builds instead of explodes, child-POV horror that never condescends to its characters, and a mystery box built to reward patient readers, this one's for you.