A small town uncovers a subterranean alien species harmed by road construction, with a recurring childhood thread tied to the same place.
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Echo of the Blackwood Road
The Hollow Country · Book 1
Twelve missing minutes. One dead patient. A road that won't let him forget.
Twelve missing minutes. One dead patient. A road that won't let him forget. Paramedic Nate Cole lost time on Blackwood Road. Twelve minutes gone from the call log, a patient dead on arrival with no explanation, and a body-camera file that ends in static. The inquiry cleared him. His nightmares didn't. Now, years later, his body temperature crashes at exactly 3:17 a.m. His skin remembers fingers that were never there. Water—any water—makes his pulse spike in ways his biosensor Mimir can document but not explain. When new cases begin surfacing along the same five-kilometer stretch of fog and asphalt, Nate is drawn back to Blackwood Road alongside a sharp-tongued doctor, a stubborn sheriff, a farmer with a sinkhole on his land, and a journalist who films everything. An AI reconstruction of the buried footage reveals what the camera captured that night—and what has been living beneath the road since long before the asphalt was poured. They are not hostile. They are not safe. And they believe Nate already belongs to them. To understand what surfaced that night, Nate will have to stop measuring and start listening—to the hum in the water, to the cracks in the stone, and to the parts of himself he sealed off the night he lost those twelve minutes. Echo of the Blackwood Road is a character-driven speculative novel about first contact beneath a small American town—where the real question isn't whether something lives underground, but what it already took from you. Book one of The Blackwood Trilogy.
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PublicationAvailable
FormatsKindle eBook & Paperback
Publication dateFebruary 26, 2026
Edition1st
Kindle print length399 pages
ISBN978-9190145111
Kindle ASINB0GQC8Z3FX
LanguageEnglish
ExtentFull-length novel
Paperback pages376 pages
Word count136,400 words
GenreGrounded science fiction / First-contact speculative fiction
SeriesThe Hollow Country
Book in seriesBook 1
Story scopeFirst book in The Blackwood triology
ToneQuiet, tense, procedural, and intimate rather than action-driven
PublisherUTP House
First-contact stories focused on responsibility, communication, small-town realism, and non-violent ethical tension.
Sustained tension, environmental disturbance, institutional pressure, references to childhood loss; no graphic violence.
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(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.”
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Audio sample in preparationComplete title informationEcho of the Blackwood Road
First contact didn’t come from the sky
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.”
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