T. Kingfisher’s novel, The Hollow Places, is an exploration of darkness that illuminates our world and ourselves. Grounded in the tradition of horror, Kingfisher tells a plucky tale of survival when faced with the worst possible perils. Her characters are lovable and happily willing to go the wrong way for our pleasure, for which we are greatly grateful.
The Setup: Kara, a recently divorced freelance graphic designer, needs a place to live, someplace affordable. Faced with the prospect of returning to live with her mother, the 34-year-old is relieved when her Uncle Earl offers her a job and a spare room backstage at his Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy of Hog Chapel, NC.
Kara takes the new job by the horns and helps Earl to catalog his questionable collection. She even makes a friend, Simon, the gay barista from the coffee shop next door. Her uncle decides to take care of a much-postponed back surgery, leaving Kara to mind the store. The fun begins when she discovers a hole is punched in the wall. She and Simon try to repair it, but a sublime darkness slips through. What else can they do but go investigate?
The Characters:
Kara: What makes Kara most endearing to me are her foibles, like how she cyberstalks her ex, which is disturbing, but also so very sad. Her most vital trait, though is that all-important horror story impulse for a character to go just exactly where they shouldn’t. Kara has this cool feature in abundance, and the reader is served a banquet of terror with a flourish.
The story is told through Kara’s frank, somewhat confessional voice. The psychic distance between the reader and the storyteller appears to be very slim indeed, but Kara demonstrates enough intelligence the reader might suspect critical portions are being withheld. The story asks for us to accept Kara’s forced acceptance of the impossible, of which the possibility she tongue-in-cheek lambasts her Uncle Earl for entertaining. In any case, T. Kingfisher has crafted a likeable character with metaphorical warts, and the reader’s response is near-automatic: We must cheer for her.
Simon: A very likeable gay man, the barista next door is Kara’s perfect cohort. He is such a good friend that he offers to kill Kara’s ex-husband. To which she responds, “You’re sweet to offer.” Simon believes he consumed his twin in the womb, that his left eye is actually her left eye. Ninja tip: If you intend to explore the sublime territory of willows and bunkers where shadowy monsters lurk and creep, choose someone like Simon who will entertain outrageous possibilities. Together they are smart enough to mark the only bunker that takes them back home with a stick.
Uncle Earl: Another supporting character with a critical role, Kara’s uncle is a point of quirky stability. Besides his devotion to Kara, his most endearing feature is a fervent belief in a wide degree of systems, which is unconventionally open to thoughtful consideration, a rarity in any time and beyond virtue now. Uncle Earl is thoughtful too. To make Kara feel right at home, he hangs these antlers above her bed:
Tone:
One of the great delights of the story is how it draws from horror story tradition. An example is the introductory description of Simon:
“He looked exactly the same now as he had the last time I had been here, five years ago, and exactly the same as he had when I’d first met him, nearly a decade ago. Simon had to be nearly forty, if not older, but he looked about eighteen. Somewhere, a portrait was probably aging for him.”
Kingfisher’s narrator casually references Dorian Gray. There are tons of genre references throughout the story, including, of course, the willows themselves. The author addresses this in her notes:
H. P. Lovecraft wrote that “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood was one of the most terrifying stories ever written. Before I read it, I assumed that this probably meant some people in it weren’t white, and I began it preparing to roll my eyes a bit. But “The Willows” is a genuinely disquieting story, for all the occasional excesses of the prose. Some lines stick with you—“the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.” Frequently, a line from a story that sticks with me is what eventually spawns a book. My first horror novel, The Twisted Ones, was derived from the line in Arthur Machen’s “White People”: “And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones.” That line stuck in my head, and eventually I had to write a book to unstick it. With The Hollow Places, I found myself thinking about this alien world, tenanted only by willows, and by strange alien forces that seek to change humans, who make funnel shapes in the sand and who are attracted by human thought… … and by otters and corpses and boatmen and a number of other elements. It seemed like an interesting place. Not a good place, but an interesting one. — (from Author’s Notes at the end of the novel)
For anyone who has read Blackwood’s novelette, “The Willows,” that casual reference of the otter is enough to provoke a chill. Blackwood paints a land of horror, one where willows “were interlaced one with another, making a great column… their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees…. nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost — rising up in a living column into the heavens.” T. Kingfisher manages to draw from this heritage and reinterpret it through her characters. Along the way we are treated to scenes like this:
This is downright scary, but throughout the characters maintain a level of humor that is both truly mad and entirely admirable. The reader will experience paragraphs of likely doom will provoke guilty laughter, often at Kara and Simon’s expense. Well I did anyway, but let’s be real about this: they had innumerable opportunities to turn around. I can’t feel guilty about schadenfreude this time.
The combination of the wit of the narrative voice, the humor, and T. Kingfisher’s writing chops that transform nightmares into a compelling reality of danger and delight all make The Hollow Places a feast for the horror aficionado, but this novel is also a portal fantasy. Its self-awareness is reflected in the fact that Narnia is mentioned 17 times by name.
So there you have it: Funny, likeable, queer-positive characters placed in an environment of absolute horror of the finest tradition. The Hollow Places is pure joy. T. Kingfisher is the pen name of Ursula Vernon, who is also an advocate for aspiring writers.
Like the first novel reviewed in this column, Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, one reason I read The Hollow Places was to research it as a possible Hugo nominee. I feel the portal fantasy aspects of the story justified its consideration. While I did not eventually nominate T. Kingfisher’s novel for the Hugo Award, I discovered a story I love and a wonderful author, which is the real payoff for doing this every year.
