The Threshold Universe is an ongoing book series written by Peter Clines and begins with the novel 14 published in 2012. The other books in the series included The Fold (2015), Dead Moon (2018), and Terminus (2020). Although 14 and The Fold were published both as paperbacks and audio books, Dead Moon began as an Audible exclusive and after its initial run on Audible, it was published as an e-book while Terminus has been published exclusively as an Audible Original. All of the audio books for The Threshold Universe have been published through Audible and all are read by Ray Porter.
Books
14 This is chronologically the first book in the series and was published in 2012 by Permuted Platinum and Audible Inc. as an audio book. This follows Nate Tucker, who lives in Los Angeles, is stuck doing data entry and doesn't know what he's doing with his life. Just as he needs to move out of his old place, Nate hears of an apartment building with extremely low rent at an after work get-together and once Nate signs his lease for 565 dollars a month (including utilities) at the Kavach building, the mysteries of the old Los Angeles brownstone begin to unravel. Nate discovers that his building manager Oscar Rommel is reluctant to tell the truth about the building along with bright green seven-legged cockroaches that skitter around his building, his kitchen light is a black light no matter what kind of bulb he puts in and the four massive padlocks that are on apartment 14. In addition to discovering the visible oddities of his building, Nate also encounters his neighbors Veek, Roger, Xela, Clive and Debbie and the newly moved-in Tim where they slowly unveil the deeper hidden secrets of the Kavach building. Over the course of the novel, the group, with Nate at the lead, discover that the building is not hooked into the Los Angeles power grid and instead pulls its power from a series of Westinghouse generators that draw from a fault line almost a mile underneath Kavach. They also discover writing on all of the walls of various apartments that includes scientific formulas, population growth algorithms and a letter from one of the men who created Kavach, Aleksander Koturovich, which helps answer the mysterious questions about the nature of the building. Aleksander Koturovic along with Whipple Van Buren Phillips and Nikola Tesla helped finance and construct the Kavach building as a protective shield against a race of alpha predators from another dimension that would be able to appear in their dimension once the population reached a critical point. Nate and the others also discover that beneath the paneling of Clive and Debbie's apartment is a series of knobs and switches that are meant to act as the controls for the building. As Nate and the others break into apartment 14 to discover the last of the mysteries of their building, they realize that a pocket of space is within the apartment and acts as a counterbalance for the power of the building. The apex of the story occurs when Andrew, another resident of Kavach who is also a member of the Family of the Red Death (a doomsday cult that worships Koturovic's alpha predators), deactivates the machine, causing it to slip into the dimension with the alpha predators. Nate and the other residents of the Kavach building hurriedly work to change the switches and dials on the control panel in Clive and Debbie's apartment. Although the building manager Oskar gets captured by a flying alpha predators, they fail to get him back and in the process Tim dies. Nate and the other residents of Kavach, save for Andrew, Oskar and Tim, Xela fixes the control room and returns the machine to Los Angeles. The novel ends with Nate becoming the new building manager of Kavach.
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