A cosmic adventure with a lot of witty humor and nightmarish images and fun characters.
- Entertaining factor: ★★★★★
- Scare factor: ★★☆☆☆
- Originality factor: ★★★★★
- Cosmic horror factor: ★★★★★
The Hollow Places is a fun and entertaining cosmic horror based on the short story The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. With great characters, an otherworldly adventure, creepy nightmarish images, witty humor and a mystery to solve, this is a great read.
It consists of 341 pages.
Plot
Kara is 34 and recently divorced. She is moving in with her Uncle Earl who owns the Early Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy in Hog Chapel North Carolina. It’s a weird place full of wondrous things but she spent most of her childhood in that place so she feels very much at home. She is also friends with the slightly older Simon, the barista of the next-door coffee shop.
When Uncle Earl has a knee surgery Kara is now in charge of the museum. All goes well, cataloging all the exhibits, welcoming tourists, accepting sent boxes of even more stuff and taking care of Beau the cat, until she finds a hole in a wall. She thinks a tourist made that hole, but there’s something strange about it too. She and Simon examine the hole and find out that there’s a whole hallway behind it. They make the hole bigger to go through it and find themselves in a concrete hall, with even a room with a skeleton.
What is very strange is that the hallway is too long and too big to fit between the museum and the coffeeshop. Then they find a big metal door which they open. Before them another world full of fog, grass mounds, water and a lot of willows opens up to them. They are astounded and decide to explore.
What they find are the stuff of nightmares. Impossible things, scary things, deadly things. After they got lost they discover how dangerous this place is. When they finally make their way back home, it’s far from over. The otherworldly place won’t let them go and Kara is scared something has followed them home after strange things happen back at the museum.
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This painting “Spring” is made with soft pastels. You can buy this fine art print on museum-quality paper in my shop at Printify. Take a look at my other art prints as well.
Short Review
The story is told by Kara herself. She has a smart, witty way of narrating the events and her own feelings and reflections and even breaks the fourth wall sometimes which makes you even more involved in the story. It’s an adventure with cosmic horrors that are original and creepy and at the same time funny weird because of Kara and Simon who also has a witty way of communicating. Kara and Simon are both great characters and the heart of the story. They are smart, brave and adventurous and feel like people you want to be friends with.
The otherworldly place feels a lot like the place in The Willows and even the beings hiding or living or being symbiotic with the willows feel the same. But it still is its own story. There’s more than just the water and the willows. And the entities are not the only entities roaming the place. It has immediately a strange creepy vibe when they set foot in that place. It’s uncanny and when they explore it gets even more strange and horrifying. With nightmarish images and a surreal cosmic vibe this place knows how to scare. These terrifying ordeals are met with wit and brave humor from Kara and Simon, which is a great combination.
The museum itself is also a wondrous place and it even gets to play a very active role. There’s also the mystery of how the hole has gotten there, if it always was there already, or was made recently.
Another great and interesting aspect of the story is that Kara finds a Bible in the other place and takes it with her. Someone from yet another world exploring the Willow world has written his journal inside it. Those texts give Kara some information, but it is mostly scary. It adds an extra creepy vibe to the whole ordeal. It becomes even worse when she and Simon dream about the Willows and want to find their way back through sleepwalking. Even though Simon has plastered it back up. That place becomes a mystery, that is creepy, intriguing and deadly. The ending does explain some things but mostly cosmic horrors don’t let themselves be explained.
The Hollow Places is entertaining, funny, exciting and scary. It’s a mysterious adventure full of cosmic horrors and nightmares with wonderful characters.
Beau the cat doesn’t die.
Read more reviews of books by T. Kingfisher:
Did You Know I Also Make Art and Designs?
you can buy my designs on apparel or stationary, mugs and more. You can learn more about it on my art & design shop page or go directly to one of my shops.