Book Review: “The Hollow Kind” by Andy Davidson
Hollow-een
It’s October 2023, and that means only one thing: Halloween is just around the corner. I’m guessing that this makes for a prime season of horror book offerings from publishers, and the paperback publication of Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind is one of those books. It’s part of a genre I’ve never heard of before (“folk horror”) but if books in this area are as fantastic as this one, I want to read more of this stuff. It also could work as a slice of Southern Gothic. However, unlike most fiction in that tradition, the characters are relatively well off (or, at least, they start that way), so I’m not sure if that qualifier is accurate. Still, no matter how you slice it, The Hollow Kind is one of those books that you won’t be able to easily put down. When it was released in hardcover last year, it earned “horror book of the year” kudos from places such as Esquire and Paste magazines. So don’t just take my word for it. This is top-shelf work in a much-maligned genre. It’s smart and sophisticated, but also creepy and atmospheric at the same time. Its monster is in the tradition of Lovecraft — something that one hasn’t quite seen before, at least in print. In any event, the book almost gave me goosebumps — and that’s high commendation from a guy whose youth featured little more than a steady diet of Stephen King.
Davidson has inherited some of King’s stylistic tics, making this novel feel like a cross between The Shining and later feminist works such as Rose Madder. The story is about a woman named Nellie and her 11-year-old son Max. Together, they wind up outside Empire, Georgia, as they are both fleeing an abusive relationship. Nellie wants to reclaim her family home, but an “interested party” wants to throw serious money at her to have the property, which totals some 1,000 acres. Nellie turns the offer down. As soon as Nellie and Max move into the home, weird things start to happen. And the cellar is particularly hungry for more than just pantry items. Interspersed with this story are flashbacks to the 1910s and 1920s and tells the tale of how the family came to have the land and how it drove Nellie’s ancestors to madness. There’s a lot of detail packed into this read, so if you blink you may miss things. However, with a novel as compulsively readable as this one, you probably won’t.
What makes this novel work is the characters. They’re three-dimensional and you care about them — even the villains. One of the antagonists — the “interested party” — is particularly memorable because he is a very bad man, but you come to understand why he turned out that way. Thus, you find yourself sympathizing with him and wishing that the author would throw him some kind of bone. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about a villain in fiction before (I’m 48 years old and consider myself to be fairly well-read). That’s what makes this work so special. Also, as noted by other reviewers, this is a story about intergenerational family violence, and how an abused child could grow up to be either the abuser or be further victimized as an adult. I might go one step further and say that this is a story about how alcoholism and mental illness can be genetically traced through a family bloodline. I particularly like the mental illness analogy because this is a story about people going mad when faced with the truly terrible things that are bound to happen in life. But read whatever you want into this one. I’m sure you may come up with a different interpretation.
If you’re new to this book or Davidson’s writing, I envy you. You get to enjoy The Hollow Kind for the first time and revel in delight through all its twists and turns. This is an outstanding piece of fiction, and my only complaint about it is that the ending is a little abrupt and perhaps a little jokey based on the suffering that preceded it. No book is perfect, of course, but The Hollow Kind comes pretty close, and I wonder if I might pick this one up later on in life to see what clues, if any, I might have missed earlier in the telling of the tale that points the way to the electrifying conclusion. This is Davidson’s third book, and I’m already curious about the previous two, and what might come next from this author. In a sense, I’ve once again found a new favourited writer to follow. That’s the hard part of being a book reviewer: you keep on discovering good writing, but there just aren’t enough free hours in the day to enjoy each one of the writers you’ve uncovered. Still, if you have the time and like horror fiction, you’re going to get a lot of mileage out of The Hollow Kind. The writing is peerless and top-notch, and even if it does echo some of Stephen King’s work, it feels wholly original: an updating of the King template for the 21st century. If horror’s your bag, be sure not to miss this one because it is quite the doozy of a tale well told. If you also don’t scare easily, you might find yourself having unsettled dreams while reading this one. It’s simply that good and effective at what it does. What more can I say? This is the perfect reading for pumpkin patch weather, so be sure to snuggle up to the fire and crack open The Hollow Kind.
Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind was published in trade paperback by Picador on October 3, 2023.
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