From TikTok sensation Celina Myers comes a fresh, intriguing novel about a woman who finds her destiny and her family after being turned into a vampire.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Hollow by Celina Myers, which releases in a deluxe limited edition on January 13th 2026.
Mia Adair isn’t even twenty-five yet, but she’s starting to wonder if her peak has already passed. She’s spent years working at her local bookstore, a job that was supposed to be temporary. As a kid, she experienced a strange sort of fame within the paranormal community thanks to her inclusion in a book that revealed Mia’s ability to talk with the dead. But that was then, and Mia’s “gift” dried up once adolescence set in. These days, she feels like she’s nobody special.
Until she dies in a tragic car crash and reawakens as a vampire…
Forced to leave behind everything she knew, Mia must choose to live with one of two rival vampire families. The Bellamy and Sutton clans share a dark, complicated history that spans centuries. As Mia learns about their age-old traditions and extraordinary powers, along with their forbidden romances and betrayals, she’s drawn toward two very different loves. And as she feels her gift returning, more potent than ever before, Mia realizes she’ll need it to protect innocent lives—and save the only family she has left.
CHAPTER ONE
The embroidered edges of the curtains that framed Mia’s double- paned windows moved in smooth ripples just above her head, the breeze brushing against her face.
Nearly every morning of her life began this way, no matter the temperature.
Mia was in love with the night and the mystery the silence carried. Every evening her mother would storm into her bedroom to slam the window closed. But regardless of how many times her mother asked her to leave the window shut, she couldn’t. The moon just called to her; in her mind, if the window was open, the sky and her were connected in a way that was only feasible if the glass wasn’t there to separate them. She thought herself a moon child.
When Mia was younger, she thought her mother was more concerned with the energy bills than anything else. She’d had no idea then that there was such a thing as bad people who sometimes crawled through windows and stole little girls. It would have made zero sense to her anyway, as the people who did make their way into her room didn’t need windows or even a door, and they never meant any harm. Her mother knew this. When Mia was barely old enough to go to school, people-l ike things would show up as faint dustings in the air. Maybe they were just a shadow or a faint outline, but she used her childlike mind to try to rationalize what she saw. Even at that young age, she could make connections with the things she had seen on TV and learned in books.
Her mother also knew that only Mia could see these people.
Mia’s mother was Elizabeth Adair, a world- renowned psychiatrist, and her passion was parapsychology. In her childhood and early teens, Mia was her mother’s most famous case. She was known as Case 37 in the book her mother had written, the work of literature that was almost a handbook for paranormal enthusiasts across the globe. It was strange for Mia during the few times she had been coaxed into sitting through one of her mom’s presentations in front of hundreds, or even thousands, of fans. The sec-ond she heard her number, 37, called out, she watched the faces of strangers light up.
She had been born with the ability to see and hear things other people didn’t. From the day she started speaking, she talked about the people in her bedroom. Seeing those strangers was as normal to Mia as breathing. Sometimes she got a few visitors a week, sometimes every night. Some of the spirits spoke to her, but most did not. Their strange movements sometimes scared her. It was strange to see a person who appeared lost and found all in the same moment. They would pace her room, having conversations with themselves as if lost in the moment, re- creating their final days. Saying the things they wished they’d had the chance to say in life. It seemed that just being seen and acknowledged was enough for them. Mia didn’t know what happened to the people after they disappeared, but she liked to think they crossed over into the afterlife. Every so often, someone would ask her to give their loved ones a message, but usually, the spirit disappeared before she could find out their name and where they had lived. It was as if Mia simply being there to hear their final words of love— or confessions of wrongdoing— was enough to release them from their earthly ties.
Elizabeth had hated being home ever since her husband, Ben, was killed in a car accident when Mia was seven years old. Mia’s little sister, Sasha, had been only three at the time. Elizabeth wasn’t completely absent from their lives; she just wasn’t there as much as a parent should have been. Like the day Mia got her first period. Or the day Sasha fell off the swings in the backyard and broke her arm. Mia was the one waking up most mornings and cooking microwave oatmeal for the girls before they caught the bus to school. The grief had a way of convincing Elizabeth that Mia was mature enough to be the lady of the house for weeks at a time. Little did Elizabeth know that her daughter was just as lost in grief, but the little girl didn’t get to escape. The whole situation had triggered a deep loneliness in Mia. She lost the opportunity to feel like a child; instead, she was just a mini adult who no one took seriously.
Elizabeth and Ben had loved each other fiercely, and in the first year after Ben’s death, Elizabeth was lost. She had a daughter who could speak to people on the other side, yet Ben never came through. Mia and Elizabeth spent countless nights sitting on the living room floor, the room full of candles, but there was no sign of him. Mia felt like she was letting her mother down. Elizabeth always reassured her that she wasn’t, but the frustration was evident in her eyes. Mia and her father had been exceptionally close; if he wouldn’t come through to her, it meant he had already passed over. That meant no final words for the love of his life, and it left Elizabeth feeling empty. The way Mia saw it, her father had been free to move on to the next phase of existence, which was a beautiful thing. She wished that her mother could see it the same way. Mia had seen so many spirits lost in all the “what-i fs,” the last thing she wanted was for her father to glide around her room, confused and asking questions she couldn’t answer. Elizabeth didn’t care; she needed confirmation that he was okay. She went as far as waking Mia up in the dead of night during an electrical storm with hopes that the energy in the air would help pull him through.
In the years that followed, Elizabeth often dropped the girls off at Slow Burn, the local hybrid coffee and book shop, on weekend mornings so she could meet with various clients over brunch. She’d kiss them on their cheeks and slip a five- dollar bill into each girl’s hand before taking off in whatever fashionable silver sedan she had leased that year. The store was one of several located in an old garment fac-tory. The wooden slats on the floor and the brick walls at the front and back of the building were original; scuffs on the hardwood showed where women had repeatedly pushed back their chairs over the course of a century. Holes in the beams overhead marked where racks had once hung with newly finished blouses and coats.
Every corner of the place smelled musty, and every floorboard was slightly offset from its neighbors. The shop rarely carried new releases, specializing in weird, old books and nonfiction by local authors. It was the kind of place where they wanted you to enjoy a book with your coffee, not feel pressured to buy. Mia loved to pick out a bizarre title and then curl up in one of the overstuffed, mismatched chairs. Her favorite spot was just underneath one of the windows, where a seamstress from an unknown time had scratched TM+LK into the wood. The initials were faded, but they were like a secret message from the past, a physical reminder of people who had once walked the floors. That at one point in time, they were the main characters. She loved seeing tributes that showed how even after people were gone, their love could carry on. Sometimes Mia hated how sentimental she was, never wanting to appear too soft.
Mr. Horvath, the owner, had welcomed the girls wordlessly as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have two unaccompanied children spend time with him on Saturday mornings. He would waddle his way down the road and unlock the doors for them, making them a pot of strawberry green tea, or perhaps a nice earthy rooibos, before flipping the sign to Open. Most kids would prefer to spend their weekends with friends, watching cartoons, or scootering around the local strip mall, but not Mia. She was happiest sitting in her chair reading books. She and Mr. Horvath didn’t speak most of the time, just existed in the same space until Elizabeth breezed in the door to collect her daughters.
As Mia visited the worlds in the pages of Mr. Horvath’s book collection, she found pieces of herself. By junior high, Sasha had outgrown the shop and spent her weekends hanging out with her friends, but by the time Mia could drive, she was working at Slow Burn on Friday evenings and weekend mornings. Mr. Horvath had quickly become something of a surrogate father. His smile reached his ears every time Mia opened the door. His boys had moved away and were preoccupied with their own families and jobs on the east coast. Mr. Horvath was the one who showed Mia how to change the oil in her car and how to save money. School was tedious, but the weekends were less so, thanks to Mr. Horvath and his book collection.
Mia’s time at Slow Burn seemed to be the only time she stayed out of minor boredom- fueled trouble. She wasn’t a delinquent, but when she was bored, she tried desperately to erase the feeling. So sometimes, instead of attending math, she’d end up smoking cigarettes in the basement of her high school, under the science wing. When she was supposed to be in history, she was instead making out with Dylan under the bleachers at the football field, a boy who pretended he didn’t even know her when they passed in the hallways. Mia’s mother worried, but she graduated on time and without an arrest or even a suspension on her record.
…
Mia looked at her phone; she had exactly forty- two minutes before she had to be in her car and heading down the lane toward work. She’d planned to work at Slow Burn through college, but the shop had closed down six years ago. Mia didn’t want to think about that now. These days, she worked for a bookstore chain, which was the only bookshop in town now. She hadn’t known at age eighteen that she’d still be working there at nearly twenty- five. It was the kind of job that was supposed to only fill a gap year between high school and college, that magical year where responsibilities were few and every day was full of a fun part- time job, friends, and drinking, but time just got away from her. After high school, college seemed like a waste of time and money. She had so many dreams and ideas of careers but no idea of who she really was or what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
After all, she’d peaked anonymously before puberty and was a household name— “Case 37”— in the paranormal community. It was so weird to Mia that she could be so wanted by one community but ostracized by her peers for the same thing. Memories easily flooded back into her mind of moments in the high school halls when spirits as solid as a human being appeared in front of her. Her schoolmates had thought she was crazy since the day they found her in the schoolyard talking to the air— they only found her more strange when she insisted she was trying to tell Maddison Alireza’s grandmother that she could move on. Teenagers didn’t take easily to things they didn’t understand.
From HOLLOW by Celina Myers. Copyright © 2026 by Celina Myers. Published by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
