I get asked sometimes why I put it right there on the front page. Queer love, every genre, always a happy ending. Not tucked into an author's note. Not something a reader discovers three books in, once they've already decided to trust me. Right there, first thing, before anyone has even clicked through to find out what Hollowmere is.

Here's why. I grew up on stories where people like Cal and Fen didn't get to keep each other. Where the queer character was the one who got sacrificed for the plot, the one who died two chapters before the ending so someone straight could grieve prettily on the page. I read enough of those books and watched those shows to know exactly what they were teaching me, and I decided a long time ago I wasn't going to write another one.

Every series I write ends the same way it promises to. Two men, against the odds, earning their happy ever after. The world changes. The love doesn't.

With The Hollow City eighteen days out, I keep thinking about how long that promise has actually been running for Cal and Fen specifically. Three books now. Let me walk you through it, without spoiling where it lands.

In The Hollow Clock, love looks like survival. Fen breaks Cal out of a building that was designed to erase him, and neither of them calls it romance, because neither of them has the luxury of naming things yet. It's a coat handed over without a word. It's a wrist grabbed on a dark street because Cal would rather protect Fen than protect himself. Crisis makes people honest fast. That book is two strangers finding out they'd rather die for each other than survive alone.

The Hollow Cathedral is the harder book, and it's the one I'm proudest of, because falling in love is easy to write. Staying is not. Book two asks the question every real couple eventually has to answer once the emergency is over. Who are they when nobody's hunting them? Cal doesn't know how to be a person in daylight. Fen doesn't know how to stay anywhere longer than a job takes. Watching two people build an ordinary life after an extraordinary one nearly killed them was the part of this trilogy that took me longest to get right, because there's no explosion to hide behind. Just two men deciding, every day, to keep choosing each other.

And now there's The Hollow City. I won't tell you what happens. I'll tell you this instead. I wrote toward an ending these two have deserved since the first page of the first book, and nowhere in it did I let the world win the one thing it was never allowed to touch. Hollowmere can take names. It can take entire families, ground into copper and light. It does not get to take this. No matter how it was to let it. I made a promise to myself and by extension to you, the reader. Honesty is something I decided a long time ago after many years of hiding who I was. Never again. I hope these books helps others do the same. Being a gay person does not mean a life of loss. 

That's the promise. It was true in book one, when neither of them could say the word love out loud or indeed knew what it was. It's true in book three, when everything else the city built has to come down. The world changes. The love doesn't. Not in my books. Not once.

The Hollow City releases July 29th. If you'd rather be reading it before that, with the lamps still wet on the page, the First Light Club is still open and the introduction to Hollowmere is still exclusively available here: https://eliaskeane.com/landers/the-hollow-asylum

Yours, Elias