House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
A dark fairytale about three sisters who disappeared on a chilly night in Edinburgh—and reappeared slightly off. Now, years later, the eldest sister is missing and the mystery unravels.
Published May 20, 2022



Novel: House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
Release Date: April 6, 2021
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Son Books for Young Readers
Format: Paperback
Source: Barnes & Noble
“As I gradually restore Words Like Silver to its archive of previous reviews written between 2011 and 2024, I'll aim to first and foremost make my reading history explorable by publishing the blurbs and short reflections as books cross my mind, with the goal of eventually transferring and fleshing out the original WLS content. For now, please enjoy a brief look at a book I love.”
Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.
Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind.
As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children.
The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years.
“Dark fairy tale” is catnip to me, although I often treat the genre with a bit of wariness. Sometimes I find the atmosphere is an excuse for disconnect and stiltedness in the attempt to make a character “otherworldly, so I approach with caution. With House of Hollow, I don't need to.
Even writing about it now, the distinctive constellation of sensations within House of Hollow feels vivid and unique, a book that retains a specific, immersive flavor. It has a strange, dark, alluring, and folky tone I loved.
The narrator was great, and the mystery was consistently compelling, mixing the timeless and modern. She feels separate, almost lonely, in ways that are ethereal but not distant, which made my heart soften towards her and her situation. I also love a relationship—in this case, a sisterhood—intensified by a disconnect to everyone else. Secondary relationships, like her and her mother, were compelling for their complexity.
Example: I loved that her weird sister was an influencer famous for wearing antler horns and sewing odd vials of perfume into her ethereal clothes; that would totally happen today in the modern era, so it made sense on all levels.
Eventually, I did find myself skimming the language repetition, but that's just because I'm a weird little freak about word frequency and how brain scans show more tactile activation when you vary your vocabulary. (The neuroscience of reading is forever fascinating to me.) In this sense though, House of Hollow is saturated and aesthetic rather than circular, for example. The atmosphere feels drenched: floral and rotted.
I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. Many love it! The patterns were familiar but the eeriness crept in, unsettling. The first time I read it, I loved but lost a little steam; I revisited it a year later and was obsessed, which goes to show the role of "right book, right time."
The details of the lore got gruesome, and it went roughly the way I expected, but I think I’d been hoping for more worldbuilding on the other side. The mystery itself felt less explosive than I wanted, but also strangely inevitable. I did love the creepiness though, so will absolutely reread. (2024 update: I did, and loved it even more the second time around.)
For fans of:
The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland; The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle; The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff; Fallen by Lauren Kate; Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by April Genevieve Tucholke; I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea; Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand; etc,.

