Tor Books and Visceral Games, a studio of Electronic Arts Inc., announced Dead Space: Catalyst, the second novel based on the award-winning Dead Space videogame franchise. Dead Space: Catalyst will be published worldwide on October 2, 2012.

Dead Space: Catalyst takes place three hundred years in the future, where mankind is tampering with the dangerous alien technology gleaned from the Black Marker, an ancient alien artifact discovered on Earth centuries earlier. Hoping to end resource constraints that threaten to make mankind extinct, the urgency sinks the already unscrupulous EarthGov to new lows. At this early stage, the Marker threat is just appearing – and is maybe even contained – except if it finds the catalyst it so desperately seeks. Two brothers, one with a special but broken mind, the other forever conflicted by the impossible chore of keeping him out of trouble, cross paths with EarthGov and the Markers at this critical juncture and forever change the course of the Marker outbreak.

B. K. Evenson is the award-winning author of the new novel Immobility (out from Tor Books on April 10, 2012), Last Days, voted best horror novel of 2009 by the American Library Association, and The Open Curtain, a 2006 Edgar Award finalist and Time Out New York best book of the year.

Since the series debut in 2008, Dead Space has been one of EA's top rated wholly-owned intellectual properties.