#Spooktober ‘The Hollow Places’ by T.Kingfisher

About the book…

A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and terror in this gripping new novel from the author of the “innovative, unexpected, and absolutely chilling” (Mira Grant, Nebula Award–winning author) The Twisted Ones.

Pray they are hungry.

Kara finds these words in the mysterious bunker that she’s discovered behind a hole in the wall of her uncle’s house. Freshly divorced and living back at home, Kara now becomes obsessed with these cryptic words and starts exploring the peculiar bunker—only to discover that it holds portals to countless alternate realities. But these places are haunted by creatures that seem to hear thoughts…and the more you fear them, the stronger they become.

With her distinctive “delightfully fresh and subversive” (SF Bluestocking) prose and the strange, sinister wonder found in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Hollow Places is another compelling and white-knuckled horror novel that you won’t be able to put down

Enormous thanks to Titan Books for my gifted review copy of the rather fantastic ‘The Hollow Places’ which is out on November 3rd !

From the ominous quote on the cover ‘pray they are hungry’ to the various curiousities and oddities to be found in the Wonder Museum where much of the novel is set, there are so many details to interact with that reading it feels like an adventure.

An adventure where things bite, and claim you for their own, an adventure where other worlds intersect with our own-but how many and where they lead to is never specified-an adventure with claws.

After leaving her husband and returning to her home town of Hog Chapel,Kara dodges a ‘stay with your mother’ bullet and instead, rocks up to her uncle Earl’s Wonder Museum. It’s a place held together with affection, curiousity , a wing and a prayer, where Kara can throw herself into a world of distraction by cataloguing Earl’s collection(rather than following her ex on social media and arguing about fanfic online). However, when he has an unavoidable hospital stay, leaving Kara on her own, things that go bump on the night reveal a hole in a plaster board wall, showing another side to the building which really shouldn’t exist.

She and Simon from the coffee shop next door begin their explorations with no idea what they will come across, and what they do find is so strange, so bizarre that escape seems impossible. And even if they do manage to get away from the vacuae, the world of the willows, will they have brought something back with them?

This is the first of T.Kingfisher’s novels that I have read, not being familiar with the ‘cosmic horror’ concept, once I had read it up and absorbed the author’s notes, I jumped in with both feet and fully embraced it in a way that became all encomassing. The human ‘need to know’, to see, to require validation and explanations is obsolete here-there is nothing tidy or routine about what Kara and Simon find. It challenges your held notions of neatly wrapped narratives and leaves plenty of room for your imagination to take a wander around unknown worlds and also to fill in the gaps, the hollow places if you will.

Kara at the beginning is very much a lovelorn creature with little to no attachments to any people or place, the same as Simon from the Black Hen has lived so widely and vicariously that his attitude to life reflects back onto Kara. As he says, he has lived a long and interesting life and if he dies, then he will have no regrets.

he is hilarious in a dry, quick witted way that had me properly laughing so that by the time the good natured bickering between them segues into a hellscape of another world-or worlds-you as a reader are properly invested in their survival.

The world through the wall is a nightmare, it juxtaposes so neatly with the solid reality of the house of wonder with its motheaten exhibits-on one hand you have items of dubious description and origin such as a s tatue of Bigfoot and on the other, a land with un-made, deconstructed people, items out of place which are soemhow melted into the landscape, and a world of fog with willow covered bunkers between lakes and water. Who built them and why, where the doors in these bunkers go to and who is on the otherside is brilliantly vague, as Kara and Simon try to piece a sense of reality together from artefacts left behind-such as a Bible with handwritten notes in chapters that no earthly Bible contains, it becomes so vast and limitless that you cannot fill in the gaps.

The Hollow Places in our knowledge of the world, of other worlds and their impact on our own is brilliantly realised, I absolutely loved the sardonic wit of Kara, the droll delivery of Simon and could picture so vividly the armoured mice on horseback in the museum cases, the Feegee mermaid and so many more. Even the cat was relatable, this is an author who knows what complete bellends your pets can be, but also how you would fight another world’s monster to save their furry butts.

Funny, witty,clever and utterly terrifying is how I would describe ‘The Hollow Places‘ and I would thoroughly recommend it to those who enjoy Stephen King, Shaun Hamill, HP Lovecraft and Tolkien.

About the author…