There's a particular feeling that comes with stepping back into a place you built. Not quite the way a reader returns to a world, though I hope you feel some of that too. More the way a person returns to a house they once lived in. You know the floorboards. You know which doors stick. You know what's buried in the garden.

That's what writing The Hollow City felt like. A return.

If you've been with me since The Hollow Clock, you remember how Hollowmere works. The lamps have to be fed. Someone has to do the feeding, and someone has to decide who. For two books, that decision belonged to people. A town chose its own. It drew its lines and lit its streets and told itself the cost was bearable, because at least the choosing was theirs.

It isn't theirs anymore.

Hollowmere used to choose who fed the lamps. Now the lamps choose.

I wrote that line and then sat with it for a long time, because it changes everything. It changes what Cal is fighting. It changes what Fen is afraid of. A town that believed it was the author of its own cruelty has to face something worse: that the cruelty was never really under its control to begin with. The light was always going to take what it wanted. The town just liked believing it had a say.

That's the city you're walking back into. Same cobblestones, same fog coming off the water, same lamps burning their patient, hungry burn. But the ground has shifted underneath all of it. The people who watched from the edges in the first two books don't get to watch anymore. There are no edges left. The city has pulled everyone toward its center, and Cal and Fen are standing right in it.

I won't tell you how their story ends. I'll only say that I wrote toward the ending these two have deserved since the first page of the first book, and that I held the line on the one promise I always make you. There is love here, and it does not lose.

Something new this time

The Hollow City is also a first for me. For the first time, one of my books will be available as an audiobook at release. You can let Hollowmere come to you in the dark, which, between us, might be the right way to experience this particular city.

It's a strange and wonderful thing to hear a world you've only ever read in your own head spoken aloud. If you've never tried one of my books in audio, this is the one to start with. And if audio is how you read best, I'm glad I can finally meet you there.

When

The Hollow City releases July 29th. Cal and Fen's story comes home.

Want to walk in early?

Here's the part I'm most excited about. Some of you won't wait until July 29th. You'll read The Hollow City before anyone else, as an ARC reader, with the lamps still wet on the page.

That happens through the First Light Club, my invitation-only inner circle. It's where the deleted scenes live, where I talk about the books the way I'd only talk to people who've read all of them, and where the earliest copies go out before release.

Getting in is simple. Grab your free copy of The Hollow Asylum, the Hollowmere prequel novella, and the invitation to the Club will be sent a little while after. Read the novella, step through the door, and you're one of the first into the city.

Claim your free copy of The Hollow Asylum →

If an early copy of The Hollow City is what you're after, this is the way in.

I'll have more for you soon, including a few things only the Club will see. But for now, I just wanted to open the door and let you smell the fog again.

Welcome back to Hollowmere. Mind the lamps.

— Elias