Holdout Springs
The last Internet-free town in America didn't get that way by accident.
Three hundred and eleven days sober, Sloane Ashworth comes home to Holden Springs, Colorado - the last town in America that refused to let the internet in, and the one place the feeds that broke her can't follow. But the quiet she was chasing had a sound of its own.
acts one and two drafted
the story
Holden Springs was a dead silver mining camp until four families bought it for pennies and rebuilt it board by board. A hundred years later, their descendants still own and run it, and it still keeps the rule that made it famous over the last 20 years: no feeds, no Internet, no algorithms, and a waiting list to get in. To the tourists it's a novelty. To Sloane Ashworth - it's the safest place to get sober after a collapse that streamed live from a balcony in Mexico - the first genuinely safe place she has stood in a year.
Then a drawing arrives by hand, no signature, and pulls her back toward Anders Lindqvist - a friend from before either of them had a public self to protect - and back toward the questions she never thought to ask as a kid. Why a private community needs a gate arm and a guard rotation. Why her great-great-grandfather wanted a dying town badly enough to rebuild it. What the four families have spent a hundred years holding out against.
"Half the town calls it Holdout Springs. Started as a joke about the reception. Feels less like a joke every year I stay sober here."
The town didn't lose the internet.
It keeps it out on purpose - but no one can say why.
A novel about modern society, the gap between reality and social media, and the difference between a place that is quiet and a place that is keeping something quiet.
Chapter one, "Homecoming," is free to read - the first of the sample chapters.
Read chapter one