Echo of the Blackwood Road
Author: Keir Solen (author page)
First contact didn’t come from the sky
Price: $ 4.99
Author Panel review
This isn’t a thriller about defeating a threat. It’s a story about learning when not to push harder, when stopping becomes an ethical act. That makes it unsettling in a quiet, durable way. I finished it thinking less about the beings under the road than about all the places in the real world where we’ve already paved over questions we didn’t want to answer.
Safiya Rahman - panel profile
Blurb
Blackwood Road was where children once played by the creek, where the ground was soft and parents told them not to wander too far. Years later, when the road is rebuilt, heavy machinery, drilling, and traffic begin causing unexplained ground failures beneath the asphalt.
Sheriff Mae Calder is assigned to manage the problem as engineers, contractors, and county officials argue that the damage can be contained and the road kept open. What the reports don’t account for is what lives below the road: the Deluvians, a non-human species adapted to underground water chambers and stone, harmed by pressure, vibration, and construction noise.
As the investigation deepens, old childhood memories, recordings, and a hand-drawn map of Blackwood Road resurface, linking the past to what is happening now. Mae must decide how much truth can be spoken, what must be protected quietly, and whether continuing to “fix” the road is causing more harm than stopping ever would.
Echo of the Blackwood Road is a grounded first-contact novel about buried lives, small-town authority, and the consequences of building over something alive.
Story
(Excerpt from “Echo of the Blackwood Road” Keir Solen)
The sky above was clear, stars fading as a thin band of pink crept up behind the tree line.
For a long time, he hadn’t been able to look at the stars without thinking of hospital ceilings and hospice lamps. Now, when he tilted his head back, he thought of something else: a map of fractures on a cavern wall, branching lines of light reaching for one another.
“They’re not angels,” he said quietly, to himself and the cows and the pond. “And they’re not devils.”
His fingers closed around the smooth stone in his pocket. He took it out and turned it over in his palm. Its surface was ordinary to the eye—a rounded, river-worn grey pebble. But when he held it just so, a faint, internal sheen caught at the corners of his perception.
As he watched, a small ripple ran across the pond’s surface.
There was no wind. No thrown rock. The disturbance moved from the center outward, widening in a perfect ring.
Daniel smiled. “Hey,” he said. “I see you.”
Format: Ebook
Paperback: Coming soon
Length: Full-length novel, approx. 136,400 words · 376 pages
Genre: Grounded science fiction / First-contact
speculative fiction
Story scope: First book in The Blackwood triology
Tone: Quiet, tense, procedural, and intimate rather than action-driven
Facts
Good to know: A small town uncovers a subterranean alien species harmed by road construction, with a recurring childhood thread tied to the same place.
Explore further
More titles by Keir Solen are available on the books page.
Ideal for readers who like: First-contact stories focused on responsibility, communication, small-town realism, and non-violent ethical tension.
Content note: Sustained tension, environmental disturbance, institutional pressure, references to childhood loss; no graphic violence.