The Underloam
Magic is forgetting. She is the one who remembers.
Wonder with a wound underneath.
About the series
In a fog-bound port city built over its own drowned districts, a seventeen-year-old girl with no memory of her childhood discovers that everything the world forgets does not vanish. It sinks, intact, into a real and enterable underworld, and she alone can pull the buried back up.
As a centuries-old secret order closes in to keep her, and the truth she is unearthing, safely forgotten, she must decide what the world is owed: the things it chose to bury, or the peace it bought by burying them.
Seven books, one closed arc, and one question asked from a hundred angles: what do we choose to carry, and what does it cost to set it down?
What you’re in for
- Magic is forgetting
- A hidden world beneath the world
- Found family
- Dark-academia-adjacent
- Slow-burn romantic subplot
- Grief and memory
- An ancient order
- Crossover · older YA and adult
- Seven-book saga
- Wonder with a wound underneath
Reading order
Read in order; each book is a complete movement of one closed arc.
- Book 1:
The Remembered Street
Available nowIn the fog-drowned port of Halewick there is a street that isn’t on any map, and Edda is the only one who remembers walking it. Magic is forgetting, and what the world forgets thoroughly enough sinks, whole and breathing, into the Underloam. Edda can reach through the floor of the world and pull the buried back up. Nothing comes up for free.
- Book 2:
The Ledger of the Buried
Coming soonTaken in by the Sextons, Edda Mercer learns the trade she was born for and forbidden: how the world’s forgetting is written into a great ledger and made to hold, and what it costs the hand that wields the spade. In the deepest room of the archive she finds a record of the erased, and in it a drowned district that answers to a name no one ever gave her.
- Book 3:
The Blank Locket
Coming soonFor the first time in her life, Edda Mercer has a family, and for one bright season the cost of what she is has gone still. It does not stay still. Something old and half-known is climbing up out of the fog of the drowned harbour quarter, wearing a face nobody in the family will name.
Book 4:The Drownmarket
Coming soonEdda follows a rumour down past the last lit street of Halewick, into the Drownmarket: a black bazaar in the drowned deep where the forgotten are bought, sold, and buried a second time. She came for an answer. The Drownmarket only sells her better questions.
Book 5:The Rising Loam
Coming soonThe war the order spent six hundred years preventing has begun, and the drowned country is rising to meet it: hands and faces and whole streets breaching the surface, following Edda’s every reclaim the way the tide follows the moon.
Book 6:The Great Hush
Coming soonTo stop the rising, Edda must go down: past the Toploam, past the Deeploam, into the deepest dark, where the fog is made of half-erased faces and time itself runs thin. The series has been going down for five books. This is the bottom.
Book 7:The Unforgotten
Coming soonEverything the Underloam ever swallowed is rising at once, and the order that held the line for six centuries is coming apart. Edda has the truth now, and the truth has not saved her. What is left is the hardest thing the series has asked of anyone: remember, and release.
About the author
Maren Holloway writes hidden-world fantasy about the things we lose and the cost of getting them back: 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 debut series, The Underloam, runs to seven books.