The Hollow Places

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 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.