On the left-hand wall, in letters eighteen inches high, someone had scratched:
They Can Hear You Thinking
T. Kingfisher, author of delightful and award-winning fantasy/sci-fi stories, returns to the horror genre this month with her latest novel, The Hollow Places.
The Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy in the little town of Hog Chapel, NC is exactly as delightful as most of Kingfisher’s short stories. The tiny business (known by locals as The Wonder Museum) is stuffed to the rafters with the strange and the random, with plenty of international bric-a-brac and decades-old taxidermy for tourists to oo and ahh over (don’t forget to buy a t-shirt!). The proprietor Uncle Earl is gently eccentric, and kind-hearted enough to offer a spare room and a job to his niece Kara, who’s still smarting from a divorce that had been building for a few years but which still came as a nasty shock.
Things stop being quite so delightful when Kara is left to look after the museum on her own and she finds a hole in one of the walls, with a hallway behind it. An impossible hallway that is somehow larger than the building it runs through, and which leads to a grey, water-filled world of willows and concrete bunkers and many, many truly horrible ways to not die.
Narnia it ain’t.
The first thing you need to know about this book is that a lot of it is just so much fun. There’s a new bit of Wonder Museum weirdness around every corner (taxidermied cane toads with little taxidermied mice riding them, nuff said), and Kara’s job of cataloging every item in the museum sounds both tedious and an amazing way to spend a summer.
Kara is the kind of person who’s perfectly comfortable living in a museum run by an uncle who simultaneously believes in Jesus and every New Age bunkum and conspiracy theory you can name, up to and including Big Foot. She also has no reservations about being best friends with Simon, who runs the adjacent coffee shop and who’s color-blind in one eye, an eye which may or may not belong to a twin sister he absorbed in-utero. The characters are all irresistibly charming, and the dialog is everything I’ve come to love about Kingfisher’s writing, with a really flippant attitude to impossible things, something that comes in handy when Simon discovers the impossible hallway behind the hole in the sheet-rock.
He took out a coin. “Heads for aliens, tails for black magic.”
“Why does it have to be black magic? Can’t it be neutral magic? Magic with no significant moral imperative?”
Simon rolled his eyes, caught the coin in midair, and slapped it on his wrist. “Good news, it’s aliens.”
“Shouldn’t we have flipped for black mold first?”
“The coin gets mad if you ask it too many questions.”
Some of the strangeness of the situation is grounded by how normal some of the problems are. Kara’s trying to avoid cyber-stalking an ex who instigated the divorce but seems put-out when she doesn’t fly into a rage about something (dealing with a murder-world behind the upstairs wall now, kinda busy) and who infuriatingly keeps calling wanting to know if they “can still be friends”.
I was starting to think that half of the angst of a divorce wasn’t the loss of stability, it was coming to terms with just how lousy your judgement had been.
Other problems felt like an everyday recurring nightmare, the one where you don’t know where you are, you can’t figure out which tiny island among a river of islands was the one you came in on, your phone doesn’t work, and if you don’t find the way out in a few hours then you won’t be home in time to open the museum on the biggest tourist day of the week and then everyone will be mad at you.
It’s when we get to all the reasons why being stuck in the strange willow world is a really bad situation that the cosmic horror element really takes hold.
I was struck again by the intense feeling that this world was only a skin over a vast other space.
The mechanics of the hole-to-another world are endlessly fascinating, something which I hope leads to more stories about other worlds, and the images Kingfisher creates for it are just stunning. (Imagine a hallway that’s bigger than the building it’s inside. Now imagine as Kara does what that would look like if the building wasn’t there anymore.) Simon and Kara explore the Willow World and see creatures that look like they’re made up of the negative spaces between the willow branches, and they don’t see an invisible enemy with bizarre footprints and a nasty habit of either eating visitors, or playing with them. It’s also attracted to the sounds of people thinking about them, so we get a running monologue of Kara desperately repeating old jingles in her head when the “don’t think of an elephant” challenge becomes a matter of life or death.
It is extremely hard to run from something that you are not allowed to think about.
Some of the worst things that the hidden enemy is capable of are described via one of my favorite tropes: the story-within-a-story, in this case the journal entries of a soldier who only had the margins of his Bible to write in. I just eat that sort of thing up; this entire book is a tasty piece of comfort-reading, something to curl up with on a chilly October evening when you’re trying not to think about how much the scraping noise of the bush outside your window sounds like something trying to scratch their way through the wall. I found myself trying to space this story out as much as possible, mostly because I wanted to keep enjoying it, but partly because, like Kara reading the notes scrawled in the Bible, I was a little scared about finding out who did or didn’t make it out alive.