The Hollow Places

The Hollow Places is a cosmic horror novel that is a bit afraid of scaring you too much. Its narrator is frequently making jokes and downplaying the grotesque events she’s witnessing, which may add to the character but also hampers the overall tension.

The narrator is Kara, a recently divorced graphic designer that decides to accept her uncle’s invitation and live with him for a while, taking care of his humble museum of wonders in a small town in North Carolina. One day, however, she finds a gap in one of the walls and a tunnel leading to some rooms that weren’t supposed to be there – physically, they couldn’t even be there. She asks her neighbor Simon to help patch the hole in the wall, but curiosity gets the better of them and they decide to explore the places it leads to.

First, they come across a bunker with a dead body, which doesn’t dissuade them from exploring further – they even joke about acting like suicidal characters in a horror movie, very aware that their actions don’t make much sense. Curiosity is the only thing driving them forward, despite all warnings of danger. Soon, Kara and Simon find themselves in another world altogether, standing on a small island looking at many others that also guard similar bunkers.

These islands are infested with willows, whose off-putting aura strongly contributes to the creepy edge of that place: the trees rustle in the wind as if murmuring to each other, speaking in a cryptic language Kara can’t decipher – the novel is inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s brilliant short story, The Willows, and it shows. Kara, then, soon realizes there’s something off with the trees, as just the act of looking at them causes a weird apprehension, as if her eyes couldn’t be trusted: “I was watching a thin skin of reality stretched over something vast and hollow,” she notices.

The protagonist, however, decides to keep exploring the place nonetheless, dragging Simon with her without thinking about going back home until it’s too late. This alien world plays with perspective to cause an uncanny feeling: they learn that they can’t rely on their eyes, just their senses. They eventually come across a school bus, whose driver seems to be there and not there at the same time, depending on how and from where you look. In another scene, they spot strange creatures between the willows, monsters made of negative space: “as the branches moved and swayed and leaves shifted, they made shapes in all the places that they weren’t.”

Despite the abstract monsters and the frightening willows, the tone of the narrative never gets too dark. The book is narrated in the first person and Kara is a character that frequently makes jokes and is sarcastic. When she finds a body in the bunker with Simon, for example, we can clearly see how they’re freaking out, but she wants to feel in control and so ironically reassures herself, “Look at how calm we are, I thought. Super Calm. Two responsible adults, being calm. And responsible.“ Later on, she even makes a joke about the body, remarking how after a few minutes it “hadn’t jumped up or attacked or done the Macarena or whatever dead bodies in impossible bunkers did when they were disturbed.”

Kara is terrified of the monsters in the willows and uses humor as a coping mechanism: if she can diminish the gravity of what’s happening, she can better manage the situation without letting fear paralyze her. But this means that, as a narrator, she’s constantly breaking the tension, making a joke or a funny analogy that takes the darkness and the edge out of the moment. She constantly refers to that alien world as Narnia, for example, and when they come across a bizarre man, who has the appearance of a skeleton and is visibly insane, wrapping his arms around a pillar while half-submerged, Kara remarks, “This isn’t Narnia. This is Middle-earth and we just found Gollum.”

This humorous side of the narrator provides a huge contrast to the horrors she has to register and put into words. When “Gollum” tells Kara about the fate that befell a woman he met, the description is rawer, and the only trace of humor hints at his madness: “When I found her again, she was all twisted up and They’d stacked her bones up next to her, all very neat, from small to large… all the little bones lined up like beads.” The character is talking about the nameless, formless monsters that dwell on the islands, creatures that can hear their thoughts and that enjoy playing with their victims, acting like mad scientists deforming bodies in grotesque ways. Much like jokes, horror descriptions can also have a punchline, which is meant to instill shock and disgust instead of laughter, and so the bizarre man completes his tale, “She was still alive. It took ages to kill her. She was like jelly…”

These creatures can not only read thoughts but also respond to them, being attracted to those that are pondering about their hideous actions. The book being narrated in the first person, then, is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it means that the words written on the page have an urgency to them, since each time Kara is writing – thinking – about the monsters, she’s putting herself in danger: each time she mentions them, there’s tension. This also allows us to see how she tries to trick herself into thinking about other subjects, singing music, or mulling over her work, and how her mind inevitably betrays her by putting the monsters back into focus: she needs to keep registering what’s happening around her after all.

But on the other hand, her humorous persona becomes an ever-present force, constantly undermining the more tense elements of the narrative: it’s hard to fear a place when it’s being referred to as Narnia all the time. This problem with the tone also affects the climax, which is a mix of cosmic horror with… Night at the Museum, which of course weakens the horror aspect.

But it’s understandable: if Kara doesn’t let the horror get to her, always coming up with a joke even when faced with eldritch monsters, it’s certainly because she was already used to the many indescribable challenges of working as a graphic designer: “I had a client who didn’t know what she wanted but would know it when she saw it,” she says remembering the dread that followed the request.

But a problem with the protagonist, and the construction of suspense in the book, is that she’s either too slow to catch up on things or is basically in denial during certain scenes, just so that a confrontation with the supernatural can be postponed: we can understand why a normal person would try to rationalize a strange event, such as a stuffed animal clawing at your door at night, looking for a rational explanation, but a woman who has seen monsters made out of negative space? We don’t buy it.

Simon is not that complex of a character either. He’s the friend who is always there for her, has a bizarre affinity with the supernatural, and… that’s it: Simon basically acts as a male version of Kara, alternating between freaking out and making jokes to alleviate the tension.

Due to the creativity of its grotesque imagery, The Hollow Places is an effective cosmic horror novel, but one that could have been much more memorable and intense if it had doubled down on the horror instead of focusing on jokes and humor.

April 12, 2022.