AWARDS:

• 2018 ESFS award «Best European Sci-fi author»
• 2017 Winner Imaginales book festival in Epinal/ France
• 2016 Grand Prix of Utopiales Sci-Fi book festival/ France
• Finalist Prix Masterton/ France
• Winner «The Portal» Scifi Assembly Ukraine

«Starobinets doesn‘t let the reader relax for a minute as she manages to keep up the hellish pace over seven hundred and something pages.»
MEDUZA (Galina Yuzefovich)

VIXEN HILL

Ripol. Moscow 2022. 716 pages

The action of this horror thriller in the genre of mystic realism takes place in the Far East, on the border of the Soviet Union and Manchuria (China) in 1945, right after the end of World War II and the Japanese occupation of the region. The novel combi- nes the history of the USSR, Chinese mythology, Japanese genetic engineering and Siberian shamanism.


After his adventurous escape from GULAG prisoner Max Kronin ends up in a small village called Vixen Hill in the middle of a no man’s land where he believes to find his wife. Vixen Hill is full of bloody miracles and supernatural phenomena. So it seems to be the right place for Max who, before the war, had been trained by KGB officer Aristov to manipulate his own dreams, predict future in trance, and bring lost people back to reality. But as all the others who once found themselves in this cursed place, also Max does not find what he is looking for. And his reality is now manipulated by his former trainer Aristov who, with the help of Max, wants to find the true and only sleeping Terracotta Army. To conquer the world he wants to resurrect this Army with the Waters of Death and Life, a mighty biological weapon developed by Japanese scientists in Vixen Hills. Here also the scientists conduct inhuman experiments in their laboratory for breeding the perfect soldier. Here Soviet warriors fall in love with Chinese werewolffoxes. Here KGB agents face a taoist master who knows the secret of immortality. Here those from fascist Ahnenerbe and those from the Soviet Secret Department represent one and the same ruthless totalitarian monster. Here the war never ends.


This is a spectacular and frightful trip to the heart of darkness where one not only comes under the power of shamans, Old Believers, the KGB, a hypnotists or a Tao Master. Here everyone finds exactly what he or she has deserved. Some find love, others find death, but everyone finds the only appropriate fate predestined either by God or by the devil.