Saving Shannon
A Dying Town, A Falling Star, A Closely Guarded Secret
- a new novel from Sam Hawksmoor
Hammer & Tong – KDP
ISBN: 978-1-7385181-3-5
Published July 2026
When a huge meteor slams into the mountain near Bryce, the ridge is transformed into a hellscape of steam and fire. The locals, ageing ex-miners in a dying town, are cut off from communications with the outside and gripped by rumors that it was an alien spaceship that crashed to earth. People are vanishing and alien activity is suspected. Then the army arrives and intend to round everyone up for 'tests'. Why? What is going in this small forgotten town...?'
UK Print and Ebook
For USA go to Amazon.com
'A gripping science-fiction thriller packed with mysery, suspense, heart and unforgettable characters.'
Saving Shannon began with a dream. Quite a number of my stories start out that way – a glimpse of something an event, a moment and it stays with you for a long time, so you have to deal with it. I recall ‘The Repossession of Genie Magee’ began with a dream of an immense flood and my protagonists struggling to survive it. ‘J&K 4Ever’ was initiated by a dream of a young orphan in an oppressive situation desperate to know the name of her mother yet scared to find out the identity of her father.
A huge meteor falling out of the sky nearly boiling Shannon alive as she was looking for her fox was the dream that started the new story. (I have pretty vivid dreams, but these are just the start of stories not the whole thing alas). Somehow Shannon survives, many don't, but rumors abound that this was not a meteor but an alien spaceship and everything escalates from there.The fox is the reason she’s in the woods, it’s wild, but responds to her because she raised it when abandoned by the mother. Foxes have been a lifelong interest for me. Apparently when I was a little child, I used to write letters to the foxes and made my father leave them in the woods. Clearly the three-year-old me assumed Foxes could read and since I’m pretty sure I couldn’t yet do cursive writing; god knows what was on those scraps of paper. In my last house a Fox used to sleep in a sunbeam in the garden and never ran away when I was out there gardening. I remember she brought her cubs there to show them where they could be ‘safe’.
Saving Shannon isn’t a story about foxes of course, it’s a way into a novel about Shannon and isolation, misinformation, and fear of aliens. It doesn’t matter if you believe in aliens or not, the fact is there is a distinct possibility in the age of AI that we can be manipulated to believe they are real and fear them.
Shannon is a bright but lonely young girl, home-schooled by Astrid her AI tutor and loves her fox, Silver. She was adopted by Dr Jongh. an astrophysicist, but pretty much left to raise herself. She has one friend, Lola, who four years before cared for her when Shannon was desperately ill. Lola is older at 19 and they don’t see much of each other since she’s working running the local hotel. The other main character is Mika, the insurance claims adjuster sent to assess the damage from the meteor but now caught up in the whirlwind of fear about alien activity and missing people. He’s trapped there now, but quickly discovers he’s needed.
Starting a novel with a major disaster is a challenge. So much will happen to everyone. When I was tackling a major pandemic in ‘Another Place to Die: Endtime Chronicles’ I was careful to start the story when it was already was well established and heading towards Vancouver. In ‘J&K 4Ever’ another dystopian story, it’s set in the USA a good fifty - sixty years from now after a major event pretty much shut down the whole country and it is divided into little kingdoms run by warlords or religious fanatics. No one reliably remembers what happened to end civilization.
In Saving Shannon everything that happens commences from the huge bolt of fire from the skies. Aside from the localized destruction it triggers a paranoid response. It’s a small community, a dying mining town immediately cut off from the rest of the world and somehow the idea that this is an alien invasion takes hold, especially when the army arrives to begin testing everyone for alien DNA.
What is real? What is fake? Who can you trust and why are so many people going missing? And what is Shannon’s secret and why is Lola so keen to prevent anyone finding out. It’s all there for readers to discover.
I hope you will join me on Shannon’s journey this summer.
A little taste from Chapter One here: The Sky Breaks
