Elias Keane | Updates

Yes. I'm Writing The Hollow Asylum.

Elias Keane — Sun, 7 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Origin of Everything

A few weeks ago, when I told you I had begun The Hollow City, I asked you a question I had never asked anyone before. Hollowmere runs on bound souls. Coal existed. Gas existed. So why would a city choose the dead over the easy fuel sitting right there? I said I had always known the answer and never told you, and I asked whether you wanted the story of it — a short, dark prequel about the choice that doomed everyone who came after.

You answered. More of you than I expected, and more insistently than I was prepared for. So here is my answer back.

Yes. I am writing it. Its name is The Hollow Asylum, and it is the beginning of everything.

I want to be honest about why I hesitated, because the hesitation is part of the craft of it. A prequel is the most dangerous thing a series writer can attempt. You already know how it ends. You know the city stands, you know the machinery runs, you know the bargain was struck — the whole saga is built on the fact that it was. So a prequel cannot survive on suspense. There is no will they. There is only how, and worse, why, and worst of all, why did no one stop it. If I get that wrong, it is just a footnote with a cover. If I get it right, it is the most frightening book I have written, because it is the one where the horror has not yet become normal. It is still a choice a person is making, in a room, with their hands.

That is the book I want to write.

The Hollow Asylum is set well over a decade before The Hollow Clock — in the first experimental years, before the Vanes understood the mathematics of what they were building, before the Church had a single robe or a single doctrine, before any of it had a name that made it sound holy. There is no sixty years of consent yet. There is no congregation nodding along. There is only a handful of people in the early dark of the thing, telling themselves it will be small, it will be temporary, it will be worth it.

The man at the center of it is an engineer named Erasmus Cassin. I have lived with him quietly for a long time. He is not a villain — that is the entire point of him, and the entire danger of writing him. He is a good engineer and, by every measure he would recognize, a good man. He has reasons. The reasons are not lies. The city is dying of its own winters; the obvious fuels are failing or were never enough; people he loves are cold. And then he finds something that works, something that works better than anything has any right to, and the cost of it is a cost he can almost convince himself isn't real, because the ones who pay it cannot be heard yet. Not at first. The hearing comes later, and it comes too late.

I have written a great deal about the moment a person decides to stop hiding. The Hollow Asylum is the dark mirror of that. It is about the moment a person decides not to look — and then builds, very carefully and with great competence, a machine that ensures no one ever has to.

I keep coming back to a sentence I wrote to you in the spring, almost in passing, and have not been able to put down since: it is easier to belong than to look. In the main saga, that is a whole city's failing, sixty years deep. In the prequel it is one man's, on day one, before there is any city to blame it on. There is no institution to hand his conscience to yet. He has to be his own institution. He has to invent the reasons himself and then believe them himself, and the most unbearable thing — the thing that frightens me to sit with at the desk — is how reasonable they sound from the inside. I do not want you to hate Cassin. I want you to understand him, and to be afraid of how easy that was.

Some of you who have read the whole saga will already be doing the arithmetic on the timeline, and you will know there is a second thread waiting in the back half of this book. I will not say more than that. There are doors in this story that are not mine to open here — they belong to The Hollow Clock, and opening them early would cost you the very discoveries that make the first book what it is. So I am holding them shut on purpose. If you have read the saga, you know what I am protecting. If you haven't, all you need to know is that the prequel reaches forward toward the books you already love, and stops exactly where it must.

A word on how this changes the shape of the year, because I owe you honesty about the work. The Hollow City remains the priority. It is the end of Cal's story and it comes first; nothing about The Hollow Asylum slows it down. The prequel is the shorter, sharper thing I write in the margins of the larger one — a novella, not a novel, lean and cold and built to be read in a sitting. I will be offering it as a reader gift rather than a shelf book: the origin story, sent to the people who actually want it, as thanks for being the readers who asked for it in the first place. More on how to get your hands on it closer to the time. If you are on the mailing list, you will be first.

So that is the answer to the question I asked you in the spring. You said yes. I listened. The book exists because you wanted it to, which is the best reason a book can have.

One more question before I go back to the desk, since asking you things has worked out rather well lately.

When you read an origin story — a prequel to a world you already love — what do you actually want from it? Do you want the comfort of recognizing things, the small thrill of oh, that's where that came from? Or do you want to be unsettled, to have the familiar world made stranger and more frightening by learning what it cost to build? I lean hard toward the second. But this is your world too by now, and I want to know how you hold it. Tell me. As always, I read every reply.

Reply here, write to me through the contact page, or find me on the mailing list. I read all of it.

email: eliaskeane@eliaskeane.com

Thank you for asking for this one. It is a strange and lovely thing, to be sent back to the beginning by the people who have come all this way to the end.

Yours,

Elias

P.S. For anyone new: The Hollow Clock and The Hollow Cathedral are both out now and can each be read on their own. The Hollow City is the third and final book of Cal's arc, in progress. The Hollow Asylum is a prequel novella, coming as a reader gift — start with the clock, and let it bring you here.

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Good

Elias Keane — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi All,

Just want to remind you that we have entered in to the final week to win a copy of my book "Hunting the Silver Fox".

Click on the link below and fingers crossed you are a winner. Good luck.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/441092-hunting-the-silver-fox-a-bear-hunt-story

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Starting Book Three of The Hollow Clock Saga

Elias Keane — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Finishing the Record

I have begun the third book. Its name is The Hollow City, and it is the end of Callum Vane's story.

I want to say that plainly, because I made a decision about this book that surprised me, and the decision is the whole reason it exists in the shape it does.

For a long time I thought the third book was a leaving story. After everything that happens in The Hollow Cathedral, the obvious next move is out, onto a ship, across the water, into the cities my characters have only ever heard rumors of. There is a whole world beyond Hollowmere, an empire that built Hollowmere, and somebody has to go and ask what that runs on. I had pages of it. I was excited by it. I still am excited by it. I love the world that I have built and want to explore more of it.

However, I realized I was writing two books at once, and forcing them to be one.

Because Cal's story is not a leaving story. It never was. From the first page of the first book, Cal has been a man trying to come home to himself, to say his own name in public, to choose the person he loves where everyone can see, to stop hiding. A man like that does not get his ending on a ship sailing away. He gets it in the city that broke him, with the work finished. So I have decided to split the books. The Hollow City stays in Hollowmere and closes Cal's story properly. The leaving story — the wider world — belongs to someone else, and I will come to that at the end.

People ask me where a book starts, and this one started with an unfinished list.

At the close of the first book, Cal frees the souls bound into the city's machinery — most of them. But the oldest bindings, the ones woven in during the first experimental decades, before the Vanes' understood the mathematics of what they were doing, were threaded too deep to lift. Those souls did not leave. They are still down there, in the Ash Quarter, so old they have forgotten the shape of their own names. Cal wrote them into his Record as unfinished business. He told himself he would come back for them. I need to honor that promise.

The Hollow City is him coming back. The book is about a man going down into the deepest part of the place that hurt him, to finish a list he has been keeping since before he knew it was a list. That is the idea. Everything else is built to serve it.

When I set out a book, I start with the emotional question, before I write a single scene. The first book asked whether one man could choose himself. The second asked whether two people could choose each other in public. The third asks the hardest one of the three: is a person ever allowed to put the work down? Cal has spent three books as the one who hears, the one who witnesses, the one who writes the names so that someone will know these people were real. The book is about what it costs to carry that, and whether you are ever permitted to set it down and simply live. The answer the book reaches is the ending of his story.

Then comes the anchor. Every book in this series has orbited one physical object — the clock, then the cathedral. This one orbits the Record itself, that satchel of names Cal has carried since the asylum. And the Record does something useful for pacing that I want to be honest about as a craft choice: it is a finite list. A conclusion is dangerous to pace. It wants to go slow, elegiac, soft. The risk is that it goes slack. But a list of unwritten names is a countdown. Every chapter crosses some off. The book is over when the list is. That gives a quiet, restitutionary final act the one thing it needs — a clock of its own.

I have also had to write this book in a lower gear than the first two on purpose. Book one was a locked building and a ticking clock. Book two was a freezing city in crisis. The instinct is to make the finale the loudest of the three. I am looking to do the opposite. The Hollow City is the city the morning after — slower, colder, stranger, a place learning to live with what it has admitted about itself. The tension does not come from escalation. It comes from the question of whether something this broken can be allowed to heal, and whether the people who broke it get to be the ones who stay.

Underneath all of it, the thing I always seem to be writing — but this time turned to face its hardest version. The distance between what people do when no one is watching and what they let others see. For three books that distance has been Cal's private burden, a record kept in the dark, names nobody else would say. This is the book where it stops being private, where the thing done in secret is finally looked at in the open.

But there is a question underneath that one, and it is the question this whole trilogy has been walking toward. Not who did this. We know who did it. The harder question — the one I have to answer if the ending is going to mean anything — is why did everyone let them?

Because the true villain of these books was never a man. By the end of The Hollow Cathedral, the evil has assumed total power, and it holds that power the way real evil almost always does: not by terror, but by consent. The Church told a city that its dead were a holy necessity — that the suffering beneath the streets was the price of order, that to question the mechanism was to question God Himself. And the city believed it. For sixty years, decent, ordinary, loving people walked over the bound and the screaming and felt nothing, because an institution they trusted had assured them there was nothing to feel. The horror never had to hide. It had become mundane. It had become accepted. It had become faith.

That frightens me, as a writer and as a person, far more than any villain could. I keep thinking about how often it has been true — how many times ordinary people have handed their conscience to an institution and let it tell them that cruelty was righteousness. And it is not only history. We are watching it now, in our own world: faith that was meant to be a shelter, a tool of love and acceptance, bent into a weapon — and standing behind the weapon, as always, the people who profit from aiming it. The robes change. The reasoning does not. This is necessary. This is ordained. The ones who suffer deserve it, or do not matter, or are not really suffering at all. And good people nod along, because it is easier to belong than to look.

So the end of this trilogy cannot only be Cal defeating a villain. That would be too small, and far too comforting. The Hollow City has to be about a city defeating its own acceptance — about ordinary people finally looking directly at what they agreed to, and withdrawing the one thing the evil cannot survive without. The doctrine does not fall because someone smashes it. It falls because the congregation stands up and walks out, and there is no one left to wear the robes. Cal's return sets the machinery free. But the city has to free itself, and the only way it can is by asking, at last, the question it spent sixty years refusing: why did we believe this, and why did we let them? If I get that right, it is a fitting close to these three books — and maybe it says something true about more than Hollowmere.

And then, the part I am most quietly excited about. Cal's gift burned out at the end of the second book. He cannot hear the souls any more. But the boy he and Fen are raising can. There is a child in these books who hears what Cal no longer can, and The Hollow City is where the witnessing passes from one generation to the next. Cal's story ends at home. The boy's story is only beginning — and his goes out into the wider world, onto the ship, into the empire and the cities beyond. That book is called The Hollow World, and it is his.

But first, Cal comes home. I owe him that, and so does the city.

Three questions for you

While I am at the beginning of this, your voices can actually shape what I write — so I want to ask.

The first. Hollowmere runs on bound souls. Coal existed. Gas existed. The whole horror of these books rests on a city that chose the dead over the obvious, easier fuel sitting right there — and I have always known why, but I have never told you. The answer lives in the first experimental decades, before the Vanes understood what they were building, when a choice was made that doomed everyone who came after. I have been wondering whether to write that story: a prequel novella about why a city would burn people when it could have burned coal. Would you want to read it? It would be short, dark, and the origin of everything. Tell me yes or no — I am genuinely asking.

The second, and more useful to me right now. The Hollow City is the end of Cal's story, which means it is my last chance to answer the things you have been carrying since the first book. So: what do you need this book to answer? What loose thread, what character, what unspoken question has stayed with you? I cannot promise to resolve everything — some doors are meant to stay open for The Hollow World — but I am reading every reply, and the right question from the right reader has changed the shape of a book before now.

And one I am asking less as an author than as a person who cannot stop turning it over. The thing I most want this book to reckon with is not the evil itself but the acceptance of it — the sixty years a whole city nodded along. So I will put it to you: why do you think people accept it, when an institution they trust tells them that something terrible is necessary, or holy, or simply the way things are? Why is it so much harder to look than to belong? I am not after the tidy answer. I am after yours. It may well end up shaping the heart of the book.

Reply here, write to me through the contact page, or find me on the mailing list. I read all of it.

email: eliaskeanebooks@yahoo.com

I will keep you posted as it takes shape. Thank you, as always, for being here and letting me share the work while it is still wet.

Yours,

Elias

P.S. For anyone new: The Hollow Clock and The Hollow Cathedral are both out now and can each be read on their own. The Hollow City is the third and final book of Cal's arc — it is coming together but no release date yet. After it, the saga continues with a new pair of eyes and a much bigger map. More on that when the time is right.

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Goodreads Giveaway now live!

Elias Keane — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi fellow book lovers,

Just wanted to let you know that I am running another Goodreads Giveaway for my 2nd book in the Bear Hunt Series "Hunting the Silver Fox"

If you want to enter and have a chance at winning one of the fifty copies up for grabs then click on the link below. Good luck to you all.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/441092-hunting-the-silver-fox-a-bear-hunt-story

cheers

Elias

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Bear Country, the 3rd Bear Hunt Story is out.

Elias Keane — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Distance Between Places

I was born in Midlands, England. I lived in New Zealand for eight years, then in Ontario for five, and I write now from near Portland, Oregon. They are not the same place. But the rooms are similar, places where the landscape teaches you to be quiet, where the weather has opinions and the mountains are old, where strangers will sit beside you without speaking and you will both feel less alone than when you arrived.

Bear Country, the third book in The Bear Hunt Stories, is out today. It is set in central Oregon, at a queer festival in a meadow outside the small town of Oakridge. There is a character in it named Augie who has loved a man named Wes for two years and has never danced with him in public. The whole book is about the distance between those two facts.

I write about distances. Every book I have written, across every series, is about the distance between what people do when no one is watching and what they let other people see. The Rourke Correlation novels make this question about power. The Hollowmere books make it about dread. The Lexingfield Murders make it about truth. The Bear Hunt Stories make it about love. I did not plan it that way. It is where my attention goes.

Thirteen years of watching countries I was not from, learning to read silences that did not belong to me, will do something to a writer's eye. I do not think I could have written this book without that time. Bear Country is set in Oregon, but the way it watches its characters — slowly, from the side, with a certain reserve — is the way I learned to watch.

If you have read The Bear Hunt and Hunting the Silver Fox, the cast in Bear Country will mostly be familiar. If you have not, the book stands alone. Each can be read by itself; together they form one larger arc.

It is the warmest book I have written.

A note for those of you who came to me through Caleb Rourke, or Hollowmere, or Lexingfield, and find the queer romance line a little outside your usual territory. Every book I have written is about the same thing, just at a different temperature. If the question of what people do when no one is watching interests you, Bear Country will be worth your time.

The book is available today in e-book, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon, with paperback and hardcover coming to other retailers soon. The Kindle edition is in Kindle Unlimited for the launch period. Three years of work, twenty-five chapters, one meadow outside Oakridge.

Thank you for being here and letting me share my writing journey with you.

Yours,

Elias

P.S. A few of you have asked whether Bear Country is the end of The Bear Hunt Stories. The honest answer is that I do not yet know. There is a thread that did not quite resolve at the close of this book, a friend named Miller, a forestry professor named Reuben, a phone call neither of them is sure what to do with. If a fourth book comes, that is where it starts. But what I have written, as written, stands on its own. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

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The Hollow Cathedral - Goodreads Giveaway

Elias Keane — Sat, 9 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As we get nearer to the release of my new book The Hollow Cathedral I am running a Goodreads Giveaway promotion where 50 lucky readers will be able to win an electronic copy of the book.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/439524-the-hollow-cathedral

The release date is 05-16-2026.

It is also available on Amazon for Pre-Order.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXQVWHVK

A Steampunk horror set in the City of Hollowmere where the clock may have stopped but the screams have not.

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BookFunnel - Thrilling the Reader

Elias Keane — Mon, 4 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Book fans,

Have a look at this promo where you can download all the latest thrillers, including In the Serpent's Shadow. Grab them for a great read.

https://books.bookfunnel.com/gomery-kimber-thrilling-the-reader/kua4eby6u6

Enjoy and as always, don't forget to leave your reviews.

Cheers

Elias

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BookFunnel - Kindle Unlimited Review Drive - May Edition

Elias Keane — Sat, 2 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi All,

Don't forget to check out these amazing books that are now available on Kindle Unlimited.

This includes In the Serpent's Shadow, part 1 of my six book series about family, betrayal, politics and power. Just click on the link and see what is awaiting you on Kindle Unlimited.

https://books.bookfunnel.com/kureviews-may/fxbtzt4kp5

As always don't forget to leave a review.

Happy reading fellow book lovers

Elias

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BookFunnel - April 2026 Mystery Thriller Suspense Sales Promotion

Elias Keane — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi fellow readers,

BookFunnel is running another promotion where you can grab some mystery thriller and suspense books, mine included.

So if you want to go and grab a copy of In the Serpent's Shadow and others just click on the link below.

https://books.bookfunnel.com/mtsaprilsales/1lbclk5tgw

As always don't forget to leave a review.

Happy reading.

Elias

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The Hollow Cathedral - Final Leg

Elias Keane — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Well after many rounds of polishing and editing The Hollow Cathedral has now been locked in for pre-release.

The final leg before the release on 05/16/2026 is to get a few ARC reviews.

So this is a call to arms. If you are interested in reading an advance copy and leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon please reach out and I will happily send over an epub.

Contact me through the contact form or pop up, or email direct to me.

eliaskeanebooks@yahoo.com

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Writing The Hollow Cathedral - Coming Soon

Elias Keane — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

People ask me where the book came from, and the honest answer is one image I couldn't let go of for a long time before I knew what to do with it.

A body breathing in a quiet room. Nobody inside it.

Everything else came after. The cathedral on the hill with its astronomical instruments drifting slowly out of true. The Arch-Cogitant in his vestments, negotiating with men who already know too much. Ships returning to the harbour with questions nobody wants to answer. Two men at the centre of it trying to build a family in a city that has never let anyone choose anything out loud. All of that came later. The body came first. The book is what I wrote to understand what the body meant.

This is a short account of how the book got built, for readers rather than for other writers. No spoilers.

The City

The book is set in Hollowmere, the coastal capital of an empire that has lived, for as long as anyone alive can remember, on a bargain it does not discuss. The clock at the heart of the city kept perfect time for sixty years. Perfect time meant trains that ran, harbours that opened on schedule, a calendar the empire could sell to everyone else. Perfect time meant power. Hollowmere was the city the rest of the world set its watches by.

When the book opens, the clock is silent. Has been for six weeks. The city is dark and cold for the first time most of its citizens can remember, and for the first time most of its citizens can remember, it's also honest.

I wanted to write a book set in exactly that moment. Not the before, when the bargain still held. Not the after, when a new arrangement has been made. The middle. The disoriented, grieving, clear-eyed middle, when the old thing is gone and the new thing hasn't arrived, and everyone has to decide, one at a time, what they actually believed.

The cathedral of the title is what sits on top of the city now that the clock is gone. It's still standing. Its bells still ring. Its high order still claims authority. Its congregation is still faithful, and their grief for the clock is real. I wanted that part to be real, and I spent a long time making sure it was. Institutions don't survive for generations on cynicism alone. The people inside the Church of the Cog mostly believed what they were told, and most of them still do, and that's what makes the institution dangerous and the book, I hope, complicated.

The Two Men

At the centre of it are two men. One has spent his life being told he's wrong about what he can hear. The other has spent his life being pointed toward a destination nobody told him about. Against considerable odds, they've found each other. The book is partly the story of what it costs to stay found in a city that has always treated private feeling as a problem to be managed.

I wrote the romance the way I wanted to read it. Slow. Specific. Aware that choosing someone out loud in a place that would prefer you didn't is one of the bravest things a person can do. The cathedral setting isn't incidental to any of that. If I could have called the book something else I would have, because titles are a nuisance, but The Hollow Cathedral insisted on itself. The institution and the relationship are the same argument from two directions. You'll see what I mean.

The Horror

It's a horror novel. I want to be plain about that, because the cover is pretty and the love story is real and people sometimes arrive at the book expecting something softer than what they find.

The horror here isn't the kind that jumps at you. It's the kind you walk into and then realise, slowly, you're standing in. An empty room that shouldn't be empty. A ceremony that makes visible, for the first time, what the beautiful thing has always been doing. A congregation singing a hymn that is more correct than anyone in the congregation knows.

I wanted the book to feel the way a cathedral feels. Cold. Vast. Acoustically strange. Full of beauty that was paid for by people you are not permitted to ask about. The horror is the question of who paid, and the answer, when it comes, isn't a monster. It's an institution. Institutions are harder to kill than monsters, and that's the engine the book runs on.

The Room

I said I'd come back to it.

Early in the book there's a room in a quiet inn where a woman's body is breathing without her. People visit her. They bring tea she can't drink. They sit with her. They talk to her in case she can hear. The room is cold when things in the city are going badly. Someone leaves flowers.

I didn't understand, when I started, that the room was going to be the heart of the book. I thought it was a setting. I thought grief was something the characters would talk about and then move past and then deal with in other ways as the plot required. It took me more drafts than I want to admit to understand that the room was not a backdrop. It was a character. It had moods. It had a voice, even if the voice was silence. The book comes back to the room again and again, because the book is, underneath everything else, about what you owe the people you love when loving them is not enough to save them.

If the book has a thesis, it lives in that room.

What I Hope You Find

A city you can smell. Two men you believe in. A cathedral that's beautiful and shouldn't be. An institution you recognise, even if the one you recognise has a different name and a different building and a different god. A love story that takes itself seriously. A horror novel that takes its horror seriously. A book that's generous, I hope, in the ways that matter — to its characters, to its grief, to whoever's willing to walk into its rooms.

The clock stopped. The cathedral is still standing. That's the problem.

Come in. The door will be open soon

Pre-Order on Amazon now - Available May 16, 2026

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Bookfunnel - SALES - Mystery/Thriller/Suspense (APRIL)

Elias Keane — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Check out this latest sales promotion for a great range of books, mine included!

Buy In the Serpent's Shadow Now!

https://books.bookfunnel.com/bfhostmysthrsussl/a4lodafbqk

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The Hollow Clock - Free Kindle Download Promotion on Amazon

Elias Keane — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Starting Friday April 16th, my latest book will be on promotion where the Kindle version will be free for a period of five days.

Grab a copy whilst you can.

In the meantime here is a taster of the book for you to enjoy.

Please don't forget to leave a review on either Goodreads, Amazon, or BookBub.

Also click the follow buttons to find out more of what I am doing for my next novel.

Happy reading

Cheers

Elias

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In the Serpent's Shadow - Only 99c

Elias Keane — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi my fellow book enthusiasts.

I am very excited to announce that I have marked down my 1st book in the Rourke Correlation series to just 99c.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GT1VM6H6

I am really looking forward to seeing what you all think. After you have read it it would be great if you could leave an Amazon Review for me

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Every light in Hollowmere is someone's last breath.

Elias Keane — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So happy to announce that my latest book has hit Amazon Kindle Store!

The city runs on stolen souls. Callum Vane can hear them screaming in the wires. After two years in an asylum, he's escaped with a forbidden record of names, and the knowledge that Hollowmere's perfect, clockwork paradise is built on a foundation of conscious suffering.

A dark steampunk tale of body horror, corporate theocracy, and one man's fight to give voice to the silenced, The Hollow Clock asks: How far would you go to save people the world has already forgotten?

Perfect for fans of China Miéville, V.E. Schwab, and dark Victorian gothic fiction with teeth.

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Two Books. One Town. No Easy Answers.

Elias Keane — Sat, 4 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a small town in Virginia called Lexingfield. A river runs through it. A library sits on the corner of Main and Church. On Thursday evenings, the lights come on in a church hall and people carrying the worst thing a person can carry come together to try to keep going.

You will visit this town twice if you read both of the novels. The second visit will change what you thought you knew about the first.

Still Water is where you start. A county sheriff has been working a case for months — no suspects that hold, a pattern he can see and cannot explain, a community quietly fracturing around him. Then, into this, comes a woman widely understood to be the most generous listener in Lexingfield. She offers to help.

The novel is built around a specific tension: the gap between what we see in a person and what they are. Multiple perspectives — the investigator, the grieving families, a hairdresser who has been watching something she cannot name for three years; all build a portrait of a town trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. The dread accumulates. The reveal is earned. But what stays with you is not the plot. It is the moral temperature of the thing: the specific horror of discovering that care and harm are not always opposites, that the most sustaining thing you have ever been given might have been given to you by the same hand that took everything else.

Still Water is the outside of a closed room. You can hear what is happening inside. You cannot quite see it.

Reflections gives you the inside.

The second novel opens at the moment the first ends, then goes back to the real beginning. Same town, same events, same river and library and oval of chairs — but from the other side of every table. The same conversations you encountered in Still Water are here again, and seeing how a single exchange registers in two different consciousnesses is not a trick. It is the point.

The decision to write from the perpetrator's perspective is a genuine literary act. The result is uncomfortable, not because of what it depicts but because of the precision with which it depicts an inner life the reader is forced to inhabit — and cannot fully condemn, because the novel will not allow condemnation to substitute for understanding. It is slower and more interior than Still Water, asking harder questions and willing to sit with them longer.

The human cost is never abstracted. Every grieving family is held in full particularity. And a final chapter — written from the perspective of the character who, across both novels, has seen the most clearly and said the least — closes things with the quietest and most emotionally precise writing in either book.

Neither novel is complete without the other. Still Water will keep you reading. Reflections will stay with you. Together they constitute something unusual: a diptych in which the second panel does not resolve the first so much as deepen it.

You finish Still Water thinking you understand what happened. You finish Reflections understanding you were looking at a much larger thing than you knew.

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Still Water has hit the Shelves

Elias Keane — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Still Water has now been published on Amazon as a Epub, Softcover and hardcover version.

When children start going missing it falls to the local sheriff to investigate their murders. Only now his daughter has gone missing and he does not know what to do. It's a race against time to solve the murders, stop a killer and help rebuild a community that has been devastated by the killings.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GL96H2X5

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The Next Chapter Begins

Elias Keane — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The 4th book in the Rourke Correlation is out now to buy.

Follow Caleb and Zane as the stakes have just been raised.

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