Frozen Hell (found John Campbell novel; 1938)

The cover of the 2019 publication.

Status: Found

Date found: Oct 2018 (discovered)
Jan 2019 (published)

Found by: Alec Nevala-Lee (discovered)
Wildside Press (published)

Frozen Hell is a book written by John W. Campbell Jr. in 1938. Campbell published an abridged version of the book, titled Who Goes There? in 1938, but the complete work remained lost until 2019. Who Goes There? had four film adaptations: The Thing From Another World (1951, Christian Nyby); Horror Express (1972, Bernard Gordon); The Thing (1982, John Carpenter); and The Thing (2011, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.). After the discovery of the full book, Alan Donnes announced that he would be the executive producer of a new film, which would be the first film adaptation of the full book.

Finding

The manuscript of Frozen Hell was discovered in 2018 in the documents of John W. Campbell Jr. by Alec Nevala-Lee when doing research for a book he was writing titled Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Nevala-Lee gave the manuscript to John Betancourt, who runs Wildside Press, an independent publishing company. In October of 2018, Betancourt created a Kickstarter campaign to publish the book, which received $155,366 of its $1,000 goal. The book was published and began shipping to backers in January of 2019.