Tuesday, July 21, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy/Horror Book Review: The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 6, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.



The Hollow Places is the latest horror novel by author T Kingfisher (the pen name of author Ursula Vernon).  It's also a spiritual successor to her highly acclaimed "The Twisted Ones", which took a line from an old classic horror story and expanded upon it into a modern quaint horror story in rural North Carolina.  As I've said before on this blog, I'm not really a horror fan (though I love Vernon/Kingfisher's work) but I enjoyed The Twisted Ones, even if it didn't quite scare me as much as it seemingly did for others.

The Hollow Places however, was genuinely scary for me, relying a bit less on jump scares (though there are some) and more on atmospheric horror.  It's another novel based upon a concept from an old horror story that I've never read, and it works really really well, with a very strong lead character and sidekick, and a plot that kept me mostly on edge throughout.  It's not nearly as witty at times as The Twisted Ones could be, but it still works incredibly well and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys horror.....


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
Kara was not looking forward towards moving back in with her mother after her divorce removed all stability from her life, and so the offer by her Uncle Earl to move in to his spare room at his museum - the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosity, and Taxidermy in Hog Chapel, North Carolina - is a godsend.  The "museum" is more a small store that allows visitors to see a bunch of oddball stuff - crazy taxidermy and objects of weird relevance and provenance - but Kara grew up loving it and her uncle and is glad to help him take care of it as he suffers from bad knees and gout.

But soon after her uncle has to leave her alone minding the museum for health reasons, Kara finds a hole in the museum's wall.  And when she explores that hole with her neighbor Simon, she discovers a corridor that can not exist, leading to a place that cannot possibly exist: a world of islands and water, filled with bunkers, and willow trees that give her and Simon the absolute creeps.  And then there are the words scrawled about throughout: "Pray They Are Hungry" and "They Can Hear You Thinking".

The more they explore this impossible place, the more Kara and Simon begin to realize the terrible danger they've found themselves in.....but is it possible for them to escape before it is too late?
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As with any novel, you really don't want to spoil too far in, but that goes perhaps double for a horror novel, when the unknown is just as big an element of the fear as anything else.  This is especially true for this novel, which is fairly short - as a result, I tried to be vague about the setup as much as I could above.  Like its spiritual predecessor (The Twisted Ones), The Hollow Places features an early middle age protagonist coming back to a family location and discovering a horror she couldn't have imagined.  Unlike that novel, the setup is different in that Kara already has people she loves or likes and cares about in the area (her uncle and Simon), but she's still mainly on her own when the horror hits.  Like that novel, she and Simon are fairly aware of horror tropes....for whatever good that'll do them.

Because the horror in The Hollow Places was a lot scarier for me than it was in The Twisted Ones.  The prior novel relied a lot on jump scares, and well they were pretty well done, but that doesn't do it for me.  The Hollow Places instead follows the classic formula of setting up an incredibly creepy atmosphere, introducing more and more creepy elements that provide a feeling of dread, and leaving much of what is causing that fear and creepiness to the characters' - and readers' - imaginations.  Perhaps a better comparison might be Annihilation (the book) in how it sets the atmosphere, but then it's more overt about its horror than that novel, as the reader and the characters discover more and more in the strange impossible place they discover.  In the prior novel a lot of the terror came from the words in a diary that the protagonist discovered, and there are similar words here, but they somehow make an even greater impact in even less time and words.  If that makes sense.

There isn't really much else to say here - it's a pretty damn scary horror novel, which is what you're looking for in horror.  All of our characters involved are pretty damn good, which makes the horror more effective as you care what happens to them, and they're all very believable - and of course they're not your typical movie horror protagonists (our main duo is a mid 30s divorced woman and a mid 40s gay man, not some college students or teens).  I could totally see this becoming a movie and scaring the bajeezus out of people, as it's already damn scary in text.  Heck, this novel didn't have the same wit and humor that I really enjoyed in The Twisted Ones, but it works so well otherwise I didn't really have a problem with it.  The novel only really has one negative - there's one element of the plot which any consumer of media will immediately expect to have some relation to the horror elements, especially after it comes back fairly quickly, but the main character (despite being generally pretty savvy) completely misses it for way too long.  But that's a small gripe and yeah I'd highly recommend this one.


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