Blueprint for the Buried
A 1950s Dystopian Thriller

About this book:

**Blueprint for the Buried** lays two timelines over the same stretch of blacktop—and whatever sleeps beneath it.

In 1953, survey chief Arthur Vance cuts a red line through Hollow Creek, Pennsylvania, condemning homes, a churchyard, and three generations of memory to make way for State Route 108. An old man in the brush warns him that the valley has a bottom, and the church floor was only built to keep it weighed down. Thirty-four years later, Arthur’s grandson Ben drills a core sample through the highway’s skin and pulls up a brick vault, a charred timber, and a lead token stamped *1953 J.M.*—the initials of the surveyor who vanished the summer the road went through. The borehole breathes cold, salty air. The asphalt begins to crack in a straight line, chasing their truck at forty miles an hour.

Gritty, atmospheric, and steeped in the machinery of mid-century progress, this is a thriller that treats a highway as a ritual and the earth as a ledger that never balances. For readers who like their horror rooted in blueprints, limestone dust, and the things infrastructure buries on purpose.