Kara finds the 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 this peculiar area—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 one fears them, the stronger they become. (www.redwombatstudio.com/)
One of the sad things about being an adult is that, when you find a strange portal to another world, it rarely takes you to a glorious adventure where you find a home that fits better than the world where you were born. When you’re an adult, those portals almost always take you to somewhere uncanny and possibly lethal. In spite of this near-truism I’ve just declared, humans just can’t seem to help themselves when we see a door that goes somewhere weird: we have to go through. Even though Kara and Simon know that the odd portal that opens up in the wall of Kara’s uncle’s Wonder Museum will probably take them someplace awful, they just have to explore. The Hollow Places, by the always amazing T. Kingfisher, tells us the story of what happens next...
Es hatte schöne Stellen und hätte gut sein können, wenn es nicht zu einem viel zu großen Teil aus langweiligen Diskussionen und Überlegungen bestehen würde, wie genau das Horror-Paralleluniversum des Buchs denn jetzt eigentlich funktioniert. Es ist ausgedachter Unsinn, es muss nicht diskutiert werden, schon gar nicht in epischer Länge!
THE HOLLOW PLACES is a horror novel where the comforting place is the museum full of taxidermy and the sight of willows strikes genuine fear and terror. Some things are worse than dying.
I love the friendship between Simon and Kara. It begins with banter developed by two people who saw each other casually in public, then slowly was permeated by the strange intimacy of sharing the same secret terrors. The world-building is great, I like the contrast between the museum and the willow world. Spending so much time in the museum before the bizarre events begin helps make the museum and its strangeness feel cozy and safe. The willow world hangs in this balance that drives terror both in what is actually shown and what its existence implies. I care about content warnings and I'm genuinely impressed by how creepy this was with so little that required specific warnings. …
THE HOLLOW PLACES is a horror novel where the comforting place is the museum full of taxidermy and the sight of willows strikes genuine fear and terror. Some things are worse than dying.
I love the friendship between Simon and Kara. It begins with banter developed by two people who saw each other casually in public, then slowly was permeated by the strange intimacy of sharing the same secret terrors. The world-building is great, I like the contrast between the museum and the willow world. Spending so much time in the museum before the bizarre events begin helps make the museum and its strangeness feel cozy and safe. The willow world hangs in this balance that drives terror both in what is actually shown and what its existence implies. I care about content warnings and I'm genuinely impressed by how creepy this was with so little that required specific warnings. It builds horror in the gap between what's expected and what actually happens, and while that's by no means new in horror, it's done with great care and precision so that I could never quite relax when it was quiet. The creepiness builds slowly, with a few specific moments that were terrifying. That time in between where things are a bit off but nothing extremely traumatizing is happening are so essential to the difference between reading a story about someone having a very bad time, and having a book make me so stressed that I have a bad time too.
It's masterfully written so that guessing the cause early does nothing to stop the horror and actually makes the anticipation even more stressful. So much of what I loved in its little details would be spoilers to describe, but suffice it to say that the explanations about the nature of the monsters and the cause of the strangeness helped my curiosity but maintained my worries for the characters. I loved this, and I'm adding T. Kingfisher to a small but growing list of authors that make me feel safe while reading horror, a genre that until recently I've had a hard time getting into.
I loved the characters. Uncle Earl and Simon were fabulous. I especially loved the scenes where the ex-husband calls and Kara doesn't give a shit because there's much worse stuff going on.
I felt like the other world was a letdown. I would rate this a three if not for the characters and Kingfisher's writing. Creatures that want to kill/eat you and can know where you are if you think about them. That's overdone.
I read The Twisted Ones in a tiny studio in Kyoto on the eighth story as a typhoon raged around me. That book scared the pants off me. This one wasn't as scary. I'm not sure why. I know the willows are a reference, but willows that change position aren't particularly scary. Things whose danger is known because Simon says so aren't particularly scary. I think what was missing was a feeling of malice - if …
I loved the characters. Uncle Earl and Simon were fabulous. I especially loved the scenes where the ex-husband calls and Kara doesn't give a shit because there's much worse stuff going on.
I felt like the other world was a letdown. I would rate this a three if not for the characters and Kingfisher's writing. Creatures that want to kill/eat you and can know where you are if you think about them. That's overdone.
I read The Twisted Ones in a tiny studio in Kyoto on the eighth story as a typhoon raged around me. That book scared the pants off me. This one wasn't as scary. I'm not sure why. I know the willows are a reference, but willows that change position aren't particularly scary. Things whose danger is known because Simon says so aren't particularly scary. I think what was missing was a feeling of malice - if new characters who could have been saviors actually were evil, or the item that caused it all had been more alive/humanoid. It's hard to attribute malice to willows.
