Maren Holloway
Hidden-world fantasy · memory & grief · found family · crossover older-YA and adult
“Magic is forgetting. She is the one who remembers.”
A marvel and a grief, in the same room.
Maren Holloway writes hidden-world fantasy about the things we lose and the cost of getting them back. She is drawn to stories that put a marvel and a grief in the same room and refuse to let you have one without the other: drowned cities still lit from within, a found family each missing a different piece of themselves, magic that always asks the user to pay.
Her work lives in the fog between older-YA and adult fantasy: weighty enough for readers who want real stakes and real loss, hopeful enough to believe a wound can be carried instead of hidden.
Her debut series, The Underloam, follows Edda Mercer, a girl in a drowned port city who can pull the forgotten back up out of the dark, and who learns the hard way that nothing comes up for free. Across seven books it asks one question from a hundred angles: what do we choose to carry, and what does it cost to set it down?
At a glance
Five things you can count on
The signature under every Maren Holloway novel, and the promises this reader can hold her to.
Magic is forgetting
One original engine, stated plainly: what the world forgets thoroughly enough doesn't vanish. It sinks, whole and breathing, into the Underloam.
Nothing comes up for free
To raise a buried thing, Edda carries its weight in her own skull. Every reclaiming cracks the surface, and something starving climbs up after.
Wonder, and the wound under it
Never a marvel without its cost in the same breath. The drowned street is beautiful. It is also a grave with the lights still on.
Found family, each missing a piece
The warmth is real, and it is load-bearing. These are people who fit together precisely where they are broken.
Loss you carry, not loss you hide
Real stakes and real grief, never graphic. The question is never whether it hurts. It is what you choose to do with the weight.
Churchyard, tide, archive, grave
No fire, no prophecy, no wizard school. The palette is fog, silt, brick, and cold water, and it never breaks character.
The Underloam
A seven-book saga about what we choose to carry, and what it costs to set it down. It begins with The Remembered Street.
For readers of
A crossover hidden-world fantasy: atmospheric and adult enough for the Ninth House shelf, hopeful and human enough for the older-YA reader.
Say hello
For rights, press, and reader mail, reach Maren Holloway directly.