Resident Evil Universe

The Umbrella Corporation makes cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and — in a laboratory beneath a mansion in the Arklay Mountains outside Raccoon City — something that gets out. S.T.A.R.S. sends its Bravo team to look into the disappearances in the woods and loses them. Alpha team goes in afterwards and finds the mansion, the dogs, the locked doors, and a researcher's diary that degrades, entry by entry, into appetite. S. D. Perry wrote the novels across the first decade of the games. The Umbrella Conspiracy and City of the Dead retell the mansion and the fall of Raccoon City; Nemesis puts Jill Valentine in front of a thing that follows her through a dying town; Code: Veronica takes Claire Redfield to a prison island; and Caliban Cove and Underworld are original stories built inside the same conspiracy. The mode is survival horror written the way it plays: locked spaces, dwindling ammunition, corporate documents more frightening than the monsters, and a cast who keep going back in anyway. Begin with The Umbrella Conspiracy and read in publication order — the conspiracy is a single escalating thread, and the books were written to be taken that way.