[Review] T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places
Something wicked this way grows…
There’s something enchantingly ominous about trees. I’ve always been fascinated with their twisted beauty and potential as portals to another world. Trees are what show us the growth cycles of the world, what it means to shed and be reborn and grow through any kind of adversity. They also have remarkable potential as elements for horror. They can keep you safe and cut you off all at the same time. T. Kingfisher’s newest novel Hollow Places plays into that fear and builds something sinister around its edges.
It takes a special talent to plant horror in an unusual yet endearing space, and Kingfisher does it with ease. A taxidermy-filled museum is the heartwarming gateway to this insidious tale of other worlds and willows with more in mind than weeping. When Kara (aka Carrot) returns to her uncle’s Wonder Museum to help him run it after a divorce that leaves her reeling she finds more in the shop than her favorite old elk head. When a mysterious and decidedly creepy new artifact shows up at the museum’s doorstep, it is nothing new, but as for the hole in the museum’s wall that seems to lead to another world…
Kingfisher is adept at creating endearingly messy characters; people with complex and imperfect lives who must face unfathomable circumstances to return to their sense of normalcy, forever marked by the knowledge of mysteriously magic possibilities amid an otherwise mundane world. She is also unnervingly skilled at ramping up the horror of her worlds. For much of the first quarter or so of the novel I felt compelled to continue simply to hang out more with Carrot and Simon, the gay barista of the coffeeshop next door to the Wonder Museum and Carrot’s depth-perception-challenged yet unfailing companion into the other world. But then, things escalate quite quickly when they reach the “Wood between Worlds” and find an otherworldly trap set for them, and see the gruesome results of what happens when you can’t escape.
Hollow Places paints vivid pictures of unnatural torture and things more than human exercising their power over humanity, of madness and nature gone wild, and of what it could look like if the skin between worlds gets punctured and the worlds bleed into each other. I’m not sure which image will stick with me longer, the seemingly abandoned school bus in the trees or the bunkers with “Pray They are Hungry” carved onto their walls…How do you fight something that knows where you are by following when you think about them? How do you avoid thinking of something capable of inflicting unimaginable torture at any moment?
I’ve always had a healthy love and respect for trees, but Hollow Places might just make me linger a little longer on the willows from now on…just to make sure they aren’t moving…
I would like to thank NetGalley and Gallery Books for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
