Review - The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher

Cover design by
Natasha MacKenzie

The Hollow Places
T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 3 November 
Available as: PB, e
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781789093308

Pray that They are hungry...

I'm grateful to Sarah at Titan Books for an advance copy to The Hollow Places to consider for review.

When Kara ("Carrot" to close friends and family) goes through a messy divorce and has to move out of her home ('I was grimly throwing my books into boxes -I was taking the Pratchett, dammit, and he could buy his own...') there are only two options - move back in with her mother, which is never going to work, or accept Uncle Earl's invitation of bed and board at his Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy in Hog Chapel. Earl is a kindly if eccentric man, not as mobile as he used to be and he could use some help. So the choice is made. 

Fortunately the place is next door to the Black Hen coffee house, presided over by Kara's childhood friend Simon, so there are advantages.

The Museum as described is a wonderful mixture of the curious, the cute, the outright fake and the plain odd. Skulls, bones and stuffed skins abound and - if some of the pieces have a 'Made in China' sticker underneath - no-one's looking in the cases, are they? It's the perfect place for Kara to lick her wounds, fill Simon in on what's been going on (he's gay, so they can swap stories about the iniquities of men) and begin cataloguing the collection in her spare time.

They one day, Kara finds something that shouldn't be there... a space she din't know about, that doesn't;t seem to fit the rest of the building.

T Kingfisher's new book is a loose sequel, of companion, to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows". I read this long, long ago (30 or 40 years ago). Something about somebody travelling by boat down a river, and coming to a space that ought not to be there - a wide, shallow basin filled with agitated willows. What happened after wasn't good.

It might seem a stretch to link this idea to a landlocked mid Western town with a coffee shop, boutique that closes goes out of business every twelve months or so, and a single hardware store, but Kingfisher uses - manipulates - the tropes of horror so well that it seems oh so credible. There's an art to that - at one level we, the readers, know exactly what to expect and will fidget if we don't get it: the slow build up while Kara dismisses what she's seeing, initial explorations, hints of danger (but not too much, not too soon, it needs time for the thing to grow in our minds).

At another levels we also need novelty, surprises and peril, the author can't follow the template exactly or she'll fail to grab attention. Well, this book grabs attention early on. It wraps its fingers through your hair and pulls, and each time it pulls is harder than the last and each pull is a greater, a deeper horror. What exists beyond that hole which has opened up in the museum wall takes time to explore and assimilate, but once Kara and Simon step through, they'r tin immediate danger.

Pray that They are hungry...

It takes time to understand what is so bad if They are not hungry, what that might lead to. Time, and horrifying discoveries about those who went before - discoveries which do make clear how much danger everyone's in, but which also spin a nagging mystery as to exactly how and why all this is happening now. And in the course of all this, while she is suffering extreme pain and distress because of what happened to her, Kara is also having to deal with fussing by her mother and her ex-husband's irritating, stalkery behaviour (of course she wouldn't, herself, stoop to tracking his on social media, oh no, of course she wouldn't).

It's a well written, page-turner of a horror story, which, time and gain, wrong-foots its readers until the final, nail-biting climax in which Kara finds herself alone, injured and assaulted by a deadly and relentless  enemy. A worthy follow-up to The Twisted Ones and enough to make me look very, very carefully at that willow tree down the end of the garden. The one shaking right now in the wind... but perhaps I won't look too closely, or for too long.

Review - The White City

Image from www.simonmorden.com

The White City
Simon Morden
Gollancz, 27 October 2016
PB, 321pp

Source: bought from my local bookshop

This is the sequel to Down Station, published earlier this year which I reviewed here. Before I go on to review The White City I'd just like to say how totally gorgeous the design of both books is - I can't see a designer credited but I think that www.blacksheep-uk.com have done an amazing job with these.

The book follows swiftly on from the end of Down Station. The motley group of London Underground workers who fled a burning city through a mysterious portal have escaped sadistic geomancer Bell and taken off with a chest of treasure - maps of Down, the country, or world, they ended up in.

They have also taken off with the treacherous Crows, which is already becoming a problem, but they need him to guide them to the White City which seems to be the only place in Down they might find out what's going on. The team - led by Dalip, the young Sikh engineer, and Mary, who has developed the ability to transform into a bird - are still in danger from the start.

I found this book a sheer joy to read. At one level it's an adventure quest from start to finish, filled with practical challenges (how to sail a boat, where to find food, how to deal with pirates). At another though it presents moral challenges: should you steal a boat? When is it right to side with pirates? Above all, perhaps, can you (should you) kill? - or, more bluntly, when may you - kill? Many of these dilemmas and questions are seen from the viewpoint of Dalip in the light both of his Sikh beliefs and his family's experiences. What would his grandfather, who fought in the War, have been willing to do? Should Dalit be willing to do the same?

At other times the viewpoint is Mary's - as a streetwise London kid her approach is initially more cynical and it's influenced by her different circumstances in Down. So we get, in effect, a commentary and debate on what is right even in a portal fantasy parallel world. That is something which I hadn't realised I'd been missing: so often the implicit attitude seems to be, oooh, a world full of goodies where I can let rip and do whatever I get away with!

Not that the book is preachy or moralistic - this is a hard world, where the geomancers enslave new arrivals. And as we see in this sequel, there may be worse things out there even than them. As Morden gives us a bit more information about the origin of Down and how it all works, we also see that the geomancers are part of the pattern, not as free as they think, with others pulling their strings.

It's deftly plotted, my only slight reservation being that in places the details of the previous book are assumed. You really don't want to start with this one, go and read Down Station first (and ideally read them one after another if you can).

Finally: Dalip thinks he's worked out the pattern of Down with the "portals" and intersecting "lines" Perhaps he has, but... that reminds me of something. Down Street is a closed LU station. So is White City, sort of (it's moved a few times). So if the next book turns out to be called Mark Lane, British Museum or Aldwych... well.