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The Hollow Places: A Novel Kindle Edition
Pray they are hungry.
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.
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGallery Books
- Publication dateOctober 6, 2020
- File size1808 KB
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What's it about?
A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and terror.Popular highlight
Other people’s horrible relatives are remarkably soothing. You can be comfortably appalled without having to deal with them yourself.403 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
“Come on, let’s go back to the coffee shop and I’ll make us Irish coffees and we’ll discuss this like people who don’t die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.”312 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Review
"There are no cheap scares here...entirely of the author’s wonderfully twisted and endlessly fertile imagination....The perfect tale for fans of horror with heart." —Kirkus Reviews
“Can horror even be this rollicking, this fun, while still delivering on the creepiness, the dread, the ick? In Kingfisher’s hands, it can.”
—Stephen Graham Jones, acclaimed author of The Only Good Indians
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Nobody ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.
They start to come around when I explain that it’s a little tiny museum in a storefront in Hog Chapel, North Carolina, although there’s so much stuff jumbled together that it looks bigger than it is. Then I tell them the name and they stop believing me again.
It makes for a good icebreaker at parties, anyway.
My uncle runs the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy.
Most of it is complete junk, of course. There are things in the cases that undoubtedly have (MADE IN CHINA stamped on the underside. I threw out the shrunken heads when I was fifteen and found identical ones for sale at the Halloween store. But the wall of Thimbles of the World is real or, at least, contains real thimbles, and all the Barong masks are really from Bali, and if the Clovis points were chipped out in the seventies instead of thousands of years ago, they were at least still made by a human with a rock. The jar of MYSTERY PODS?! on the counter are the cones from a Banksia plant, but they’re a mystery to most people, so I guess that counts.
And the taxidermy is real, insomuch as it is genuine taxidermy. That part of the museum has eleven stuffed deer heads, six stuffed boar heads, one giraffe skull, forty-six stuffed birds of various species, three stuffed albino raccoons, a Genuine Feejee Mermaid—which I keep trying to get him to rename because I think it’s probably racist, or at least he could put a sign up explaining the context—two jackalopes, an entire case of dried scorpions, a moth-eaten grizzly bear, five stuffed prairie dogs, two fur-bearing trout, one truly amazing Amazonian river otter, and a pickled cobra in a bottle.
There’s a lot of other stuff, too. That’s just the ones on the first floor. I’m leaving out the things in boxes, and some things are hard to count. How do I classify the statue of St. Francis of Assisi with the carefully stuffed and mounted sparrows perched on his arms? And I’m not really sure whether the scene of tiny taxidermy mice in armor riding cane toads counts as one thing or as six mice and two toads. They’re in the case with the armadillo purse (and do I count that as clothing or as taxidermy?) and a mug that may have been used by Elvis Presley. The mug has an American flag on it. Uncle Earl put an album sleeve behind it and a large sign proclaiming that Elvis came to the Lord before he died. I’m not sure if that’s true, but Uncle Earl firmly believes that every celebrity he likes came to the Lord before they died. I think this is so that he can picture them partying with angels instead of being hellbound.
Uncle Earl believes strongly in Jesus, Moses, the healing power of crystals, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, that aliens landed at Roswell but the government is suppressing it, secret histories, faith-healing, snake-handling, that there is an invention that will replace gasoline but the oil companies are suppressing it, chemtrails, demon-possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and that there’s proof that aliens contacted the Mayans and the Aztecs and probably the Egyptians, but the scientists are suppressing it. He believes in Skunk Ape, Chupacabras, and he positively adores Mothman. He is not Catholic, but he believes in the miracle of Fatima, visions of Mary appearing on toast, and he is nearly positive that the end times are upon us, but seems to be okay with this, provided it does not interfere with museum hours.
Uncle Earl also likes nearly everyone he’s ever met, even the ones who believe in none of these things. If you made a Venn diagram of the saved and the damned, the damned would all be outside Uncle Earl’s personal circle. He doesn’t like to think of people he knows being in hell.
I tried pointing out once that the nice tourist couple he’d just talked to for forty-five minutes were Muslim.
He said that was fine. “There’s a lot of Muslims in the world, Carrot.” (My name is Kara, but he’s called me Carrot since I was two years old.) “God wouldn’t send all those good people to hell.”
“A lot of people would disagree with you.”
“That’s fine, too.”
It’s hard to argue with Uncle Earl. He can believe in too many things at the same time, without any apparent contradiction.
“Dr. Williams at the coffee shop says the earth is billions of years old.”
“Could be,” said Uncle Earl. “Could be. Creation took seven days, but I don’t know how long a day is for God.”
“But you’ve got a sign in the case with the prairie dogs that says the earth is four thousand years old.”
“It’s a quote from the Reverend James Smiley. It’s attributed down at the bottom. If it’s wrong, it’s on him. I’m not here to judge. The visitors can decide for themselves what they want to believe.”
“What if they decide wrong, though?”
“God forgives a lot,” said Uncle Earl. “He has to. We all do a lot that needs forgiving.”
I gave up.
When I was a kid, my classmates asked if I thought the museum was creepy. Some of the taxidermy was old and kind of battered, and you turn around the wrong corner and there’d be glass eyes staring at you. One of the albino raccoons had a particularly unpleasant grin. But, no, I never found it creepy. I grew up in it. I was sitting behind the counter taking people’s donations when I was so young that I needed to sit on a phone book to reach the cash register.
(Years later I realized that I could probably have won instant fame from my classmates if I’d made up a story about the museum being haunted by the ghosts of the stuffed animals, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. Oh, well. Opportunities lost.)
The sign out front of the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy mostly has small print, but the word WONDERS is large, so most people call it the Wonder Museum. There are a lot of jokes—“I wonder what Earl was thinking,” “I wonder where he gets this stuff.” They stopped being funny a long time ago, but we all smile politely anyway, in case the person saying it has money.
To answer the second question, Uncle Earl gets the stuff at flea markets or estate sales or on the internet or he makes them himself. He dabbled in taxidermy for a long time and he has lots of friends on the internet. People like Uncle Earl.
To answer the first question, I don’t always know what he’s thinking either.
There was a time, when I was sixteen and working at the Wonder Museum for a summer job, that I tried to argue with him. I was angry at everything because this is the natural state of sixteen-year-olds.
“You believe in evolution,” I told him. “You just don’t know it.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Doesn’t seem right, us coming from monkeys.”
“Look, you believe that babies take after their parents, right?”
“Of course. That’s just genetics, Carrot. For example, your momma always liked to argue, and look at you now.”
I favored this with a snort and plunged onward. “And you believe in survival of the fittest, right? That fast antelope live long enough to have babies and slow antelope get eaten?”
“Sure, Carrot.”
“That’s evolution, right there. That. Those two things together.”
Uncle Earl shook his head sadly. “Doesn’t seem right,” he repeated, “us coming from monkeys.”
I threw my hands in the air and stomped into the back to rearrange the armored mice.
A few weeks later, shortly before I was done with summer break, he informed me that he had come around on evolution.
“What?”
“Thinking you must have been right, Carrot.” He nodded. “Seems like we must have evolved.” He waved a finger at me. “Only thing that explains Bigfoot, isn’t it?”
I stared at him. I did not even know where to begin.
“Yep,” he said, taking my silence for agreement. “Bigfoot’s the missing link, all right, so you figure we gotta have a chain in order to have a link missing. I’m gonna update the sign in the prairie dog case.”
He smiled at me beatifically and I went and got him the sign from the prairie dog case so that he could remove the words of the Reverend Smiley. Even at sixteen, I was learning that you had to pick your battles.
Eighteen years to the day after Uncle Earl accepted Bigfoot into his life, my marriage ended.
It would be a better story if I had walked in to find my husband, Mark, in bed with my best friend and dramatically told him to never darken my door again. But it was just two people who got married too early and had a long, slow slide into comfortable misery. I can’t even say that it was my idea. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that I could leave him or that he could leave me, and it was rather surprising to find out how wrong I was.
I felt a lot of panic because I had no idea how I was going to support myself—he had the better job, with health insurance—but the rest of the emotional stuff got a lot easier.
He offered me the house, which I couldn’t have afforded to keep. I declined.
Which is how I found myself, at thirty-four, staring down the barrel of moving back in with my parents.
I love my mother. I cannot live with her. We are too much alike. If you have ever seen those photos of two deer who get their antlers locked together during a fight, dragging each other around until they both starve to death, you have a pretty good idea of how my mother and I get along.
Our optimal living distance is about two hundred miles. This is close enough that, in an emergency, I can drop everything and get out to see her, but limits random visiting. Since we are both aware of the whole locked-antlers problem, we can manage short bouts of family togetherness, then retire back to our respective corners to recover.
Moving back in with her was a more upsetting prospect than the divorce. Freelance graphic design just doesn’t pay a lot, though, and it was going to take me months to save up a deposit on an apartment. I actually contemplated lying and saying I was living with a friend and moving into a room at the YMCA, but it turned out that even the Y had a waiting list.
Jesus Christ.
So I packed. I had a pretty good system: pack for an hour, cry for five minutes, pack for another hour, rinse, repeat. I was grimly throwing my books into boxes—I was taking the Pratchett, dammit, and he could buy his own—when the phone rang.
It was Uncle Earl.
That in itself was unusual. Uncle Earl liked the internet a lot, but he wasn’t great on the phone. He called on my birthday every year, but that wasn’t for months yet.
“Hi, Uncle Earl. What’s up?”
“Hi, Carrot. It’s your uncle Earl.”
“Yes, I…” I closed my eyes and leaned against the bookcase. Pick your battles. “How are you doing, Uncle Earl?”
“Me? Oh, I can’t complain. The gout came back last month, but the doctor’s a real nice lady. Museum’s doing well.”
I realized that I’d derailed him and waited.
“Heard you were having a rough patch, Carrot.”
“Well, these things happen.” I had an immediate urge to downplay the divorce, even though I had been sobbing furiously about an hour earlier. “I’ll manage.”
“I know you will, hon. You were always tough as an old boot.”
From Uncle Earl, this was highly complimentary. I laughed. The tears were still a bit too close, so it came out strangled, but it was a laugh.
He hemmed and hawed for a minute, then said, “I’m sure you’ve got plans already, but I wanted you to know, I cleaned out the spare room at the museum last year.”
“What?”
“The spare room in back,” he said patiently. “Next to my workshop. I know your mom’s probably real excited to have you back home”—this was a profound lie, and we both knew it—“but you know, with the gout, I don’t get around as easy as I used to right now, and if you wanted to stay here for a bit, I thought I’d offer.”
“Uncle Earl.” I could feel the tears starting up again and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“It’s no trouble,” he assured me.
“I would love to stay there,” I said, all in a gasp. My mother lived sixty miles from Hog Chapel. My ex-husband had visited the Wonder Museum once and told me the place was “kinda freaky,” so all my memories of the Wonder Museum were good ones, without him in it. I could wander around the dusty cases and pet the stuffed grizzly and make the armored mice reenact the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
Hell, I could actually catalog the damn collection and earn my keep.
“Really, Carrot?”
“Really.”
“Great!” I think he might have been as surprised as I was. “Then I’ll get some new sheets for the bed. Just let me know when you’re headed down.”
I thanked him a few more times and hung up, and then I cried on the bookcase for a while.
When I finally stopped, I wiped my eyes, then I took all the Lovecraft and the Bear and left Mark with the Philip K. Dick because I never liked androids anyway.
Product details
- ASIN : B084G9KFDF
- Publisher : Gallery Books (October 6, 2020)
- Publication date : October 6, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 1808 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 348 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1789093309
- Best Sellers Rank: #47,216 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #95 in Occult Suspense
- #197 in Occult Horror
- #223 in Horror Suspense
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
T. Kingfisher is the vaguely absurd pen-name of Ursula Vernon, an author from North Carolina. In another life, she writes children's books and weird comics. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy and the Eisner, and has won the Hugo, Sequoyah, Nebula, Alfie, WSFA, Coyotl and Ursa Major awards, as well as a half-dozen Junior Library Guild selections.
This is the name she uses when writing things for grown-ups. Her work includes multiple fairy-tale retellings and odd little stories about elves and goblins.
When she is not writing, she is probably out in the garden, trying to make eye contact with butterflies.
www.redwombatstudio.com
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I think the best part about it is how slowly it develops the creep factor. We start in this wonderful little museum of improbable and impossible things that might look scary and unusual, but are, most of them fake. And our protagonist is someone who grew up in that museum. Who knows every nook and cranny of that building, who played among the display cases and hugged the stuffed animals as if they were her childhood friends. To Kara, or "Carrot" how her family and friends call her, the museum is the safest place on earth. This is a refuge when her family life is shattered by a divorce. A chance to regroup and start over.
And the author takes time to set the stage and introduce us to Kara and her uncle, as well as the museum itself. It's done in such a way that as a reader, I was in love with the little building as well. I was feeling warm and safe there.
So when creepy and unexplained things start happen in this safe place, it completely knocks the ground from under your feet along with the protagonist. The horror of what's happening has an even bigger impact because it is intruding into this safe zone.
The author also introduces the horrors of the Willows very progressively. At first, it just looks like a slightly creepy, but ultimately benign world. Yes, it's flooded. Yes, there are bunkers everywhere, but no people. Yes, the willows are strange, but they are just trees, right? As more an more bizarre things happen to our protagonists, as the level of horror slowly ramps up, so did my blood pressure. I felt for them. I felt with them, especially after the school bus and their realization that they lost their bunker, and that they are possibly stuck in this weird no-man's land forever.
I loved Kara. She is funny, she is a mess, but she is so relatable. Maybe because I've been in her shoes, with a messy divorce and a husband that acted exactly the same way. Yes, Carrot was slightly too stupid to live when it came to one particular object, but I can let it slide, because I liked everything else about her.
And Simon! If I had to get lost in a weird in-between place of existence with somebody, he would be my first choice. He is cool under pressure, and funny, and also relatable.
And special shoutout to Beau, the bestest, most adorable cranky cat in literature.
As I mentioned, the horror in this slowly builds up and finds its culmination when the safe place suddenly becomes unsafe. Unlike other horror books I've read recently, the author didn't drop the ball here. The resolution is satisfying and the ending is everything I wanted it to be. And even though our protagonist win in the end, they are left with physical and emotional scars, which is also very logical and realistic.
All in all, this was a very enjoyable book. I will definitely recommend it to my friends and I will check out other books by this author. Heck, I already told my husband he absolutely needs to read it.
This book made it easy to transition into something creepy and the little splash of gore was just enough. It felt a little slow in spots. But it didn't keep me from reading. The main character was a lot of fun and Simon was a small nod to the Mad Hatter. (In the way he dressed). The opening of the book was hilarious. I enjoyed Uncle Earl. Beau is now my favorite cat in literature. Give it a read. You won't be disappointed!
SPOILERS BELOW THIS LINE
So Carrot has a wonderful sense of humor. Simon reminded me of the Mad Hatter if he was a fan of Emo music.
The only critiques I would leave is I felt as though the chapters where they are in the willows didn't have enough detail to give me a true sense of the surroundings. The bunkers were well described but the actual willows land felt fuzzy. Singer was also a bit fuzzy. She was supposed to be from another dimension yet seemed very human. None of the soldiers raised an eye brow it seemed. Then Martin's accent had me a bit lost. Not the way in which I heard it in my head, but the way it was described. (Probably just a me thing). Just those small nit picking critiques.
I will say I enjoyed the way the humor was laced into the story. It gave you a periodic sense of relief at just the right times without jarring you away from the creep factor. Simon was connected with Carrot just enough that it made total sense he would save her from the willows. They shared a bond. I loved the insertion of the soldiers Bible journal. That was really creative. You got to read a second perspective without diving deep into another character. It didn't take away from Carrot or Simon.
The taxidermy coming to life and defending Carrot made sense. The souls of the animals may be long gone but the idea that their flesh remembered who their care taker is was a great twist. The otter carving moving around and Carrot not seeing that for what it was didn't make sense. I explained it away because she was in an anxious state focused on the doorway and dismissed everything else. Which I am glad I did because it was a great ending. All in all, definately would read more of this authors books.
I would recommend this to my friends.
First of all the blurb is a little deceiving. She is not really obsessed with the words she finds on the bunker's walls, and they are doors that should lead to alternate realities.
But the story was good, even though it was kind of slow, but the banter, the 'one liners', comments, and jokes, which may or may not were meant to be, were funny, and there were many times I let out a giggle or a snort escape while listening.
I really liked the characters. How they handled the situation was real. Their reactions were a mix of denial, and after a few swear words, there was, 'yeah that really did happen'.
The descriptions of the characters and settings were great, and the storyline, for the most part, was okay, I just didn't care much for the portals or the hallway.
Yes, there were creepies, 'Pray they are hungry', and other things that weren't much of a shock, but the 'monsters', except for the one(s) at the end, some were different, but for the most part they didn't do much for me. I still love my willow tree in my front yard. While there was an explanation for it all, to me it felt a little dry.
The jokes, morbid humor, and the real to life characters kept this book entertaining.
3 Stars
Top reviews from other countries
Als ich dann einen Blick darauf warf, warum es in "The Hollow Places" geht, fiel dieser Blick eigentlich nur auf das Wort "willows", was sofort eine Trigger-Wirkung hatte. Hatte die Autorin etwa...
Ja, sie hat. T. Kingfisher hat sich Algernon Blackwoods Geschichte genommen, bzw. sich Grundzüge daraus beherzt geliehen, und in einen ebenso atemberaubenden wie atmosphärischen Roman eingewoben, der deutlich die Handschrift einer Autorin trägt, von der ich in Zukunft bitte jedes Buch für das erwachsene Lesepublikum haben möchte (T. Kingfisher schreibt unter einem anderen, ihrem eigentlichen Namen, auch Kinderbücher) und gleichzeitig für diejenigen Leser, die Blackwoods Geschichte kennen, jede Menge Aha-Momente bereithält.
Man muss das Original, also "The Willows", nicht kennen, um trotzdem ein riesiges Vergnügen an "The Hollow Places" zu haben, aber schaden kann es nicht. Es handelt sich dabei, das ist vielleicht wichtig für Leser, die auf Gemetzel und jede Menge Blut stehen, nicht um eine Horrorgeschichte, jedenfalls nicht, wenn man Horror mit den vorgenannten Zutaten verbindet, sondern um "speculative fiction", in der das Grauen subtiler aufgebaut wird. Und auch "The Hollow Places" ist kein Horror-Schocker, wenn auch T. Kingfisher die ein oder andere Szene zu bieten hat, die man besser nicht vor dem Essen zu sich nimmt (und auch nicht unmittelbar danach). Es ist aber auch, zum Glück, auch sonst völig anders als Blackwood. Denn anders als der genannte Herr hat T. Kingfisher nämlich hat etwas, was dem zumindest in seinen Geschichten völlig fehlte: sie hat Humor und ein Herz für ihre Protagonisten, und das macht den ganz, ganz großen Charme von "The Hollow Places" aus. Die Protagonistin "Carrot" und ihr schwuler Freund Simon sind zwei, die man unbedingt kennnenlernen möchte - vorzugsweise im Kuriositätenmuseum von Carrots Onkel und lieber nicht auf der anderen Seite von dessen Außenwänden. Immer wieder bricht man während des Lesens ganz unvermittelt in hysterisches Gekicher aus, genau wie die Protagonisten, denen als Reaktion auf den Irrsinn, der sie ebenso unvermittelt heimsucht, gar nichts anderes übrigbleibt, wenn sie nicht den Verstand verlieren wollen. Und es ist wie gesagt, trotz allem und jedem ein einziges Vergnügen, mit den beiden die "Hollow Places" zu erkunden, auch wenn einem, sollte man nicht gerade nervös kichern, schon mal die Kinnlade in die Knie fällt. Spätestens beim Otter, um das mal abzurunden, war das bei mir der Fall.
Jetzt warte ich sehnsüchtig auf "A House with Good Bones", T. Kingfishers neuen Roman, in einer Ausgabe, die ich mir leisten kann.
Und darauf, dass irgendein Verlag mal bitte auf die Idee kommt, nicht nur die YA-Bücher dieser Autorin (jaja, die gibt es auch noch) ins Deutsche zu übersetzen, sondern eben auch ihre, nennen wir es dann doch eben so, subtil-humanen Horror-Romane.
The characters, the world through the tunnel, the willow light and the beings on the edge of the world, everything kept me gripped with every page. Simon and Kara are fantastic protagonists, realistic and flawed, and using dark humour at the worst of times.
This is the third book I've read by T Kingfisher, and I've loved every one. If you want weird, quirky characters, stories written with incredible imagination, characters that are so relatable, then read her books. Highly recommend!