House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland

“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.

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“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” and the plot slow. (See: The Hazel Wood.) Being lyrical isn’t often enough.

Still, the atmosphere can be compelling enough to discount those flaws, as in the case with House of Hollow. Even writing about it now, the distinctive constellation of sensations 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. 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, the same language became heavy-handed, which made more inclined to skim. The patterns were familiar, all floral and rotted. It’d been five stars up until the third quarter or so, where it felt slow, and the ending, which was eh. 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. The mystery itself felt lackluster and less explosive than I wanted. I did love the eeriness 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,.