Elias Keane | Updates

Last Call — Line of the Ball Goodreads Giveaway Ends August 15

Elias Keane — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick, slightly urgent note.

The Goodreads giveaway for Line of the Ball is closing in a few days — August 15. There are still 100 free Kindle copies up for grabs (U.S. only), and once they’re gone, they’re gone.

If you’ve been meaning to enter, now’s the moment.

Quick reminder of what’s waiting:

He was paid to break Julian Rosemont’s heart.

He wasn’t supposed to want to keep it.

Ranch boy vs old-money polo dynasty.

Enemies who collide harder than their horses.

A slow, brutal burn that turns into the kind of heat you feel in your teeth.

And yes — a found family in the locker room being chaotic in the best way.

This is my steamiest book yet. High-heat M/M sports romance with all the tension, stolen nights, and feelings neither of them saw coming.

Enter the giveaway here before it closes:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/445995-line-of-the-ball

That’s it. No long speech. Just a heads-up so you don’t miss it.

If you’ve already entered — thank you. If you win, I hope Mason and Julian keep you up far too late.

See you on the other side of the 15th.

Elias

P.S. While you’re here, The Hollow City (the finale of the Hollow Clock Saga) is still on sale if you fancy something darker and more gothic after all that heat. Links are on the site as always.

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The Hollow City is out tomorrow

Elias Keane — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Hollow Clock Saga finishes tomorrow.

On 29 July, The Hollow City goes live in every format: Kindle (on sale at $2.99 for a limited time, and free with Kindle Unlimited), paperback at $14.99, and hardcover for anyone who wants the complete trilogy standing together on a shelf.

You already know the shape of the story if you’ve been here for the first two books. The clock stopped. The cathedral fell. The lie still stands. Cal has one last descent left to make, and the city has one last question it has been avoiding for sixty years.

If you received an early copy — whether through the Goodreads giveaway or another route — I would be genuinely grateful if you could leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads tomorrow. Early reviews are the single most useful thing a reader can do for a new release in its first days.

As a small thank-you, every reader who leaves a review will be entered into a raffle for a signed hardback of The Hollow City. The draw is on 15 August. Simply leave the review, then reply to the newsletter (or email me) with a link or screenshot so I can add your name.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3GHF4MW
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/252895483-the-hollow-city

I wrote three books and a prequel inside Hollowmere. The last chapter is not quite the last word, but it is the end of the story I set out to tell.

Thank you for walking through the cold rooms with me.

The lamps are lit.

Elias

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The Hollow City arrives July 29

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

Four days. After three books, a prequel novella, and more hours inside Hollowmere than I can honestly account for, the Hollow Clock Saga finishes on Wednesday.

I want to say something about what it took, because I think the making of a book is worth more than the marketing around it.

The Hollow City was the hardest of the three to write, and the reason is structural. A finale has to pay off promises made years earlier by a writer who was, in several respects, a different person. Every thread the first book laid down had to come back changed rather than merely resolved.

The clearest example I can give you without spoiling anything: William Vane's failsafe. Book One handed Cal an inheritance and a family name he never chose, and told you the failsafe worked. In this book Cal finally sits down with his grandfather's own working papers, the schematics and the carbon copies and the letter written the night before the Cradle went live, and reads what the man actually did. There is a hard boundary drawn on that map. There is a note in the margin about human cost, tidy block capitals, no follow-up. What Cal has spent three books carrying as a debt turns out to be something considerably worse than a debt, and the shape of the rest of the book comes out of that hour at a desk with a dead man's handwriting.

That is the sort of thing I mean by a promise coming back changed. There were passages I rewrote six times because the version that was technically correct still felt like an obligation being discharged rather than an ending being earned.

What I was chasing, the whole way through, was the feeling I get from the books that made me want to write this series at all. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell taught me that a magical world holds together better when its magic has bureaucracy, history, and bad manners. Piranesi taught me that a building can be a character and that loneliness can be rendered as architecture. C.L. Polk's Witchmark showed me a gaslamp world where the queerness sits at the center of the story rather than being smuggled in around the edges. Those books are in the DNA of this one, and I would rather say so plainly than let anyone guess.

The ending itself I am not going to talk about. I will say that Cal and Fen get theirs, because they always do with me, and that you will walk through some very cold rooms to reach it. What I set out to write was a happy ending with an invoice attached. The people who make it out the other side pay for the passage, and the city they wake up in on the last page is dark and poorer and honest. Whether that reads as a victory is a question I have deliberately left with you.

I will also say that the last chapter is not quite the last word. Soot's story does not end at the harbor. There is a road out of Hollowmere, and it runs a long way.

All three formats go live on the 29th. Kindle, paperback at $14.99, and a hardcover for the people who want the trilogy standing together on a shelf.

Pre-order The Hollow City: Pre-order The Hollow City →

One last thing. In the front of this book there is an apprentice clockmaker named Genevieve Vonderloch, working at a shop in the Tangle. She exists because a member of the First Light Club won a contest to name a nameless face in the Ash Quarter, and the name went to print. Thank you, Gena. I hope she finds her way into a few more doorways yet.

Thank you for reading this series. Some of you have been here since the first book went up, when I had no idea whether anyone would follow me into a city with a clock at its heart. You did, and it changed what I thought this whole experiment could be.

Yours,

Elias

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Line of the Ball: 100 free Kindle copies on Goodreads

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

The Windward Cup Dynasty is two books deep now, and I'd like as many readers as possible to come in through the front door. So there's a Goodreads giveaway running for Book One, Line of the Ball: one hundred Kindle copies, entries open until August 15, 2026, U.S. only.

It's the one where a broke ranch kid gets hired by a man he doesn't know to get close to a polo captain he's never met, and then discovers the assignment has a reason behind it going back a generation. Enemies to lovers, slow burn, old money against no money, and a happy ending you'll have to earn.

Entry link: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/445995-line-of-the-ball

Book Two, Crossing the Line, is out now, so if the first one lands for you there's no waiting involved. Book Three, Sudden Death, is in drafting. It opens with a shocking incident that will be hard to get over.

If you've already read the first two, a rating, an add to a Goodreads Listopia or a shelf add does more for a self-published trilogy than almost anything I can pay for. Thank you to everyone who has already done that.

I will keep you posted on how Sudden Death is going.

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Giveaway Winners Announced: One More Way to Get The Hollow City Early

Elias Keane — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Goodreads giveaway has wrapped, and 100 winners now have their copies of The Hollow City in hand. If that's you, thank you for entering, and I hope Hollowmere treats you well.

Close to two thousand of you entered, though, which means a lot of you are still waiting. I don't want the story to end there for you.

So here's a second way in. I'm running an ARC program for The Hollow City through Booksprout: free early copies in exchange for an honest review once you've finished. No purchase, no catch, just early access ahead of the July 29th release.

If you didn't win the giveaway, or you just don't want to wait, this is for you: Get your free early copy

Thank you, sincerely, to everyone who entered. This one's for you either way.

Yours, Elias

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Why I Never Queried a Single Agent

Elias Keane — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why don't you publish traditionally?

I get a version of this question every few weeks, usually from a reader who liked one of the books enough to look up who wrote it. Why isn't this published by a real publisher? Why is one person doing all of this alone?

I want to answer it honestly, because the honest answer isn't romantic. It isn't a story about rejection letters and finally proving everyone wrong. I never queried an agent. I never sent a manuscript to a publishing house and waited by the mailbox. I looked at the traditional path early on, decided it wasn't built for the kind of writer I wanted to be, and went the other way.

Here is what traditional publishing tends to ask of an author. Pick a genre and stay in it. If Still Water sold well as literary crime, the expectation would be another book like Still Water, then another, until the name on the cover became a genre unto itself. I understand why. It's easier to sell a reader something they already know they want.

But I didn't want to write the same book four times under four different titles. I wanted to write a city that runs on souls, and a sheriff investigating his own daughter's disappearance, and a man learning to trust the person paid to break his heart. Different genres, same question underneath all of them: what does it cost to finally be seen by someone, and is it worth paying?

A traditional publisher would have made me choose. Indie publishing let me refuse to.

None of this was quick to admit to myself

Here's the part I don't say often enough. I'd been writing for years before any of this existed as anything but a folder on a hard drive. Manuscripts finished, half-finished, shelved and returned to, in most of the genres I've since published under Elias Keane. What I hadn't done was let anyone else read them. Early this year I decided to find out whether that was worth changing: whether readers would enjoy these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them. Self-publishing wasn't just the practical choice at that point. It was the only way to ask the question and get an honest answer in months instead of years.

The pen name did the rest of the work

Writing under Elias Keane instead of my own name meant the work could stand apart from everything else in my life, including a day job managing costs on energy projects that has nothing to do with gaslamp fantasy or sports romance. It also meant nobody was deciding, on my behalf, which parts of "Elias Keane" were marketable enough to lead with. I decided that. Queer love, every genre, always a happy ending isn't a tagline a committee handed me. It's the thing I actually believe fiction should do, and I put it on the front page myself.

Speed matters more than I expected it to

I didn't anticipate how much I'd come to value moving fast. Since committing to this earlier in the year, I've put out a new novel or novella roughly every few weeks across four series, and that pace only works because most of those manuscripts were already written, sitting in that folder, waiting for someone to finally send them out. A manuscript gets pulled out, edited, produced in four formats, and it's live within weeks. Readers who found The Hollow Clock didn't wait a year and a half for The Hollow Cathedral. They waited a few months. That pace is only possible because there's no acquisitions meeting standing between a finished book and a reader who wants it.

I'd rather answer to you than to a sales meeting

The part I didn't expect, going in, was how much I'd like knowing my readers directly. The First Light Club, the giveaways, the free novellas that exist purely to say thank you for being here: none of it runs through a publisher. It runs through a mailing list I built and a website I control with an email that I directly manage and answer. So when I get an email asking whether I'm really writing The Hollow Asylum, I get to just say yes, and then write it, because you asked. And I love that connection.

That's the trade, as I understand it. Traditional publishing offers reach and a certain kind of validation. Indie publishing offers speed and a direct line to the people the books are actually for. I picked the second one, and several books into finding out whether readers would meet me here, I'd pick it again. Don't get me wrong, never say never. There may be a future where I do both but I for now I think this way is working. Now I just need to master the art of marketing!

Yours, Elias

P.S. Speaking of what indie publishing lets me do on my own timeline: The Hollow City, the third book in the Hollow Clock Saga, lands July 29th. If you've been waiting, now's a good time to lock in a preorder so it's already on your device the morning it goes live.

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Every Book Ends the Same Way

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

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

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Surprise Drop: Line of the Ball Is Out Now — My Steamiest Book Yet

Elias Keane — Tue, 7 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

I have a surprise for you.

After keeping this one close to my chest, I’m thrilled to announce that Line of the Ball — Book One of the Windward Cup Dynasty — is out now.

This is my first full dive into high-heat M/M sports romance, and I turned the heat up significantly. Expect steamier scenes, intense chemistry, and that slow-burn-to-inferno energy. It’s still classic Elias Keane storytelling — queer love, found family, and characters with real weight — but this time the spice is turned all the way up.

Here’s a taste of what’s waiting for you:

Mason had his elbow on the bar and a two-finger pour of Glenlivet sweating in his hand. The stranger beside him was holding a neat rye, thumb tracing the line of the glass.

They’d been talking for half an hour — just enough time for the veneer to go soft around the edges. The man’s name hadn’t come up. Mason hadn’t offered his own. It was its own kind of courtesy.

After a lull, the stranger’s gaze shifted sideways. “That’s the third time you’ve watched the door,” he said. “You expecting someone?”

Mason smiled into his glass. “Just checking for sudden changes in the weather.”

A flash at the corner of the man’s mouth. “Suppose you get a lot of those out here.”

“Depends on how you define sudden,” Mason said.

They let a few beats pass. In the mirror behind the bottles, Mason watched the stranger’s face from a new angle — the way his jaw stayed tense even when he laughed, how his hair fell just enough to shadow his eyes.

“You here with anybody?” Mason asked.

“No,” the stranger said. “Are you?”

“Not tonight.”

The stranger looked away, tongue pressed to his teeth like he’d almost said something and thought better of it.

Mason tipped his chin toward the stairs at the back of the bar. “There’s a room upstairs. Nobody’ll bother us.”

The man didn’t blink. He held Mason’s stare, then stood. He squared his jacket, slipped a couple of bills onto the bar, and waited.

Mason rose beside him. He led the way up the stairs without looking back. He heard each measured step behind him.

Upstairs, the hallway was short and quiet. Mason picked the door at the end and opened it without ceremony.

The lamp on the nightstand threw a tight pool of yellow over the bed. Mason let the door swing closed and stood there, watching the stranger look around.

The man kicked off his shoes, lined them up neatly, then took his jacket off slow and clean, folding it once before setting it on the chair. He started on his shirt buttons.

Mason watched his hands work. “You nervous?” he asked, voice low.

The man looked up. “Not really.” A small smile. “Maybe a little.”

Mason nodded. “Doesn’t show.”

“That’s the idea.”

He crossed the space and stood at the foot of the bed. Mason reached up, hooked his fingers in the hem of the open shirt, and pulled him closer. The man let him. Mason ran his hands up the man’s sides, thumbs tracing warm skin and the lines of muscle. The stranger inhaled sharply, then let it out slow.

Mason leaned in and pressed his mouth to the center of his chest, then lower, to the cut of his stomach. The skin was hot under his lips. The man’s hands found Mason’s shoulders, fingers digging in for balance as Mason kissed lower still.

If you’re looking for a steamy, addictive summer read with polo, rivalry, secret deals, and two men who can’t stay away from each other, Line of the Ball is the perfect vacation binge.

Get your copy now:→ Amazon

You can also read the full blurb here:
https://eliaskeane.com/books/line-of-the-ball

If you grab it, I’d love it if you left a review on Amazon or Goodreads — it genuinely helps more than you know.

And while you’re here, sign up for the First Light Club to get a free exclusive novella, The Timber Wolf:
https://eliaskeane.com/landers/free-the-timber-wolf

This is just the beginning of the Windward Cup Dynasty. Book Two, Crossing the Line, is coming Q3 2026.

Thank you for reading and for letting me surprise you like this. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Happy summer, and happy bingeing!

Elias Keane

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The Clock Strikes Closer: What to Expect Before The Hollow City Arrives

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

Happy 4th of July everyone,

There is a particular kind of quiet before a book goes out into the world. The manuscript is finished. The files are locked. All that is left is the waiting, and the hoping, and the small daily work of making sure the right readers find out a new door has opened.

That door opens on July 29, when The Hollow City, Book Three of the Hollow Clock Saga, finally reaches shelves.

If you have been with this series since The Hollow Clock first pulled back its curtain, thank you. If you found your way in through The Hollow Cathedral, or slipped in sideways through the prequel novella The Hollow Asylum, thank you too. Every reader who has followed these characters through fog and gaslight and grief has helped build the world that The Hollow City now steps into.

What The Hollow City Brings

This installment picks up the threads left smoldering at the close of The Hollow Cathedral and pulls them somewhere darker and stranger. Without spoiling the turns ahead, expect the saga's usual promises kept: atmosphere thick enough to touch, a love story that refuses to look away from itself, and an ending you can trust even when the road there is not gentle. Queer love, every genre, always a happy ending. That has never changed, and it is not changing here.

An Invitation for First Light Club Members

For those of you already inside the First Light Club, you know this space exists because you went looking for more. You found The Hollow Asylum, you stepped through, and you became part of the inner circle of readers who get the earliest look at what is coming next.

This month, that membership comes with something extra: the chance to name a watchmaker's apprentice in the Ash Quarter, a character who will appear in The Hollow City. Entries close July 14, so if you have not sent in a name yet, now is the time. Consider this your personal invitation, ahead of everyone else, to be part of the story before it fully arrives.

If you are reading this and you are not yet a First Light Club member, the door is not closed. A new invitation goes out to readers every month. If you would like one, let me know, and I will make sure you are on the list for next time.

eliaskeane@eliaskeane.com

What This Month Looks Like

Between now and July 29, here is what is happening behind the scenes and in front of you:

A Goodreads giveaway for 100 copies of The Hollow City is open now and closes July 15. If you have not entered, there is still time. - https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/442800-the-hollow-city
Advance reader copies are going out, and early reactions will start trickling in over the coming weeks. If you are an ARC reader, thank you for reading early and speaking up. If you want to be an ARC reader please let me know and I will send an invite to The First Light Club and a link to an early ARC release of the book.
New content is coming to TikTok and social media, small glimpses of the world and its characters, built for anyone who wants a taste before the full book arrives.
And once The Hollow City is out, the whole Hollow Clock Saga will be part of a BookBub promotion in August, with all three books priced at $2.99 for the rest of that month. More on that when it happens. Don't forget that The Hollow Asylum is free to all as an exclusive download on my website - https://eliaskeane.com/landers/the-hollow-asylum

The Part Authors Do Not Always Say Out Loud

Here is the truth about publishing a book in 2026: writing it is only half the work, and sometimes it feels like the smaller half. Getting a book seen, actually seen, by the readers who would love it, is its own quiet battle. Algorithms shift. Feeds are crowded. A hundred other books are asking for the same five minutes of someone's evening.

The one thing that has never stopped working, in any era of publishing, is a reader telling another reader "you would love this."

So here is my call to arms, if you are willing to answer it. If you have read The Hollow Asylum, The Hollow Clock, or The Hollow Cathedral, or found your way into the Bear Hunt Stories, or followed the Rourke Correlation through its long conspiracy, or sat with Still Water or Reflections from the Lexingfield Murders, and any of them stayed with you, even a little, tell someone. A friend who likes gothic fantasy. A sibling who has been meaning to try queer romance. A family member who just wants a book with a happy ending guaranteed at the end of it.

Word of mouth is the oldest marketing tool there is, and it is still the one that matters most. Every recommendation you make is worth more than any ad I could run.

The Hollow City arrives July 29. Thank you for being here for it, and for everything that comes after.

Yours, Elias

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The End of Callum Vane

Elias Keane — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I knew how this book ended before I knew how it began.

That happens sometimes. A character walks into your head fully formed and walking toward something, and you spend three books finding out what. Callum Vane arrived that way. I met him in The Hollow Clock with the lamps already burning and his hands already dirty, and I think some part of me knew even then where the road went. I just didn't want to look at it too closely.

Now I have. The Hollow City is out on July 29, and it is the end of his story.

I want to be honest about what that did to me, because I think readers can tell when a writer is protecting himself.

There is a particular dishonesty in finales. The temptation is to give everyone what they want. Tie the threads. Pay off the promises. Let the people who survived stand in the light at the end and call it earned. And some of that is right, some of that is what a story owes you. But a finale that only gives is a lie. The reason an ending lands is that it costs something. You cannot have the weight without the loss. I knew that going in, and I still spent weeks circling the last act like a man who keeps walking past a door he has to open eventually.

The strange thing nobody warns you about is the grief. Not the reader's grief. Mine.

I have lived inside Callum's head for the better part of a year. I know how he takes his silences. I know what he does with his hands when he is afraid and trying not to show it. I know the exact shape of the thing he wants and cannot say, because I built that shape, one scene at a time, and then I had to take it somewhere final. Writing the last chapters felt less like finishing a book and more like saying goodbye to someone I had been quietly arguing with for months. When it was done I sat for a while and did not feel triumphant. I felt the way you feel after a long visit with someone you love, driving home in the dark, already missing them.

And here is the part that surprised me most. The relief came too, right alongside the grief, and the two did not cancel out. They sat together. I was sorry it was over and glad I had not flinched. You can hold both. I think the best endings ask you to.

If you have been with me since the first book, you already know the things I cannot say here without spoiling what I worked hardest to protect. You know what the lamps cost. You know who Callum is when no one is feeding them. So I will only say this. I did not look away at the end. I owed him that, and I owed you that, and the promise I make on every book I write still holds, even here, even in Hollowmere where so little is gentle. The love does not change. The world does, and it takes what it takes, but the love is the thing left standing.

That is the whole reason I write what I write. Every genre, every town, every series. The world changes. The love doesn't.

The Hollow City releases July 29. If you want a copy before then, I am giving away one hundred of them on Goodreads through July 15, and the First Light Club gets first light, as they always do.

Come and say goodbye to him with me.

Yours, Elias

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Win a Copy of The Hollow City — Goodreads Giveaway Now Open

Elias Keane — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The lamps are nearly lit. The Hollow City, the third book in the Hollow Clock Saga, releases on July 29th — and ahead of launch day, I'm giving away 100 e-book copies on Goodreads.

It's free to enter, and the giveaway runs until July 15th. One hundred readers will have Cal and Fen's story delivered straight to their library before anyone else.

This is the book the whole saga has been walking toward. Hollowmere spent two books believing it chose who fed the lamps. It doesn't anymore. The machine no longer cares whose child it takes, and there is no name old enough or seat high enough to buy your way clear of it. If you've followed Cal, Fen, and Soot this far, this is where it all comes due.

Enter the Goodreads giveaway →

If the draw isn't kind to you, there's no need to wait — The Hollow City is available to preorder now, and lands on every Kindle on July 29th.

And if you'd like to step into Hollowmere even sooner, the free prequel novella The Hollow Asylum is waiting for you at eliaskeane.com/landers/the-hollow-asylum.

Mind the lamps. I'll see you in the city.

— Elias

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Return to Hollowmere

Elias Keane — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

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Introducing the First Light Club

Elias Keane — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There's a moment in every Hollow Clock story where the soul-lights flicker on across Hollowmere — that first pale glow before the color blooms into something alive. I've always thought of it as the moment the city exhales. Things are about to begin.

That's the feeling I wanted to name the First Light Club after. Because this is about new beginnings, too.

Why I did this

I've been writing as Elias Keane for a little while now, and something I've noticed — and honestly been moved by — is how many of you aren't just reading the books. You're in them. You ask about the districts of Hollowmere. You send messages about which Bear Hunt pairing wrecked you the most. You notice the through-lines between the series. You're paying attention in ways that feel genuinely rare.

The First Light Club exists because that kind of readership deserves something more than a newsletter that arrives in your inbox twice a month. I wanted a place to have a proper conversation — somewhere that feels a little smaller, a little closer, and a little more like a room we've all chosen to be in together.

What I want to do with it

Honestly? I want to let you behind the curtain a little.

That means things like early looks at covers and titles before they go public. Deleted scenes and the kind of context that doesn't make it into the books themselves — why a character changed between draft and page, what a location was originally going to be called, which plot thread I pulled on until it unravelled and had to start again.

It also means I want to hear from you. The First Light Club isn't just me broadcasting. I'm interested in which worlds you want more of, what you're hoping for, what's landing and what's not. You've earned the right to that conversation.

There'll also be the occasional exclusive — reader magnets, early access, some giveaways, that sort of thing. But the honest core of it is just: more of the writing life, shared with the people who actually care about it.

How to join

The First Light Club isn't open to everyone, and that's intentional. I want it to feel like something worth belonging to, not just another list to sign up for.

Membership is by invitation to existing subscribers. If you're already on my mailing list, watch your inbox — you may have already received an invitation or I'll be sending invitations out soon, and you'll be the first to know when the doors open. If you're not subscribed yet, you can join my readers' list at eliaskeane.com and you'll be on the list for the next wave.

That's it. No fees, no tiers, no complicated sign-up process. Just a quieter room for the people who want to be in it.

I'll see you in the first light.

— Elias

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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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