Line #43 Literature/TheHollowPlaces


1	''Pray they are hungry.''
2
3	When freshly-divorced Kara moves in with her Uncle Earl to help run his whacky Wonder Museum, she expects nothing more strenuous than cataloging skulls, taxidermy, and fake artifacts. But when she finds a hole in the wall that leads to a mysterious bunker and decides to explore it with friendly barista Simon, she finds something stranger and more terrifying than she could have imagined. The bunker opens into an alternate world full of willows--and worse things. And getting home, as Kara soon learns, is not the same as getting home free, because the hole's still open...
4
5	Creator/UrsulaVernon (writing as T. Kingfisher) riffs on Creator/AlgernonBlackwood's "The Willows".
6
7	----
8	!!The Hollow Places contains examples of:
9
10	* AlienKudzu: An example with literal kudzu. One unfortunate man found his way into the Willows by getting lost in a kudzu cathedral. [[spoiler: More prominently, the Willows themselves.]]
11	* ActionSurvivor: Neither Kara nor Simon knows how to fight, but they're good at improvising under pressure.
12	* AlternateUniverse: There are at least three others, probably more, all accessed from the willow dimension, which Kara likens to a kind of backstage or maintenance shaft for reality. Bible guy and his squad were from a universe with a country called the UNA, while the woman they met was from a different universe, and Sturdivant is probably from a third universe, but not necessarily.
13	* AmicableExes: Averted. Kara's ex Mark is trying so hard to be amicable that it just makes her mad because he won't give her any darned space--until the supernatural horror kicks in, and then Kara is so busy she's not thinking about Mark at ''all''.
14	* ApocalypticLog: A soldier from another world started journaling in a Bible, which Kara takes home and reads. He chronicles meeting a survivor from yet a third world named Singer, the deaths of his squad, and their plans for evacuation, [[spoiler: upon which it abruptly cuts off. Kara chooses to believe it's not apocalyptic after all, since there's no way she'll learn for certain either way, and it makes her feel better to think they're alive.]]
15	* BigDamnHeroes: Just as Kara is about to be mauled by [[spoiler: the animated giant otter, the willow-light animates Prince. At first she's horrified because she thinks Prince has been taken over--but instead he turns and gores the otter before it can get her.]]
16	* BlindSeer: Downplayed. Simon doesn't see well through his twin's eye, among other things having a kind of color blindness and poor depth perception. But it lets him see into higher dimensions much better.
17	* BodyHorror: The reason why you should pray that They are hungry--if They eat you, ''all'' they'll do is kill you. But if They're not feeling peckish, They'll play with you instead, and this trope is Their idea of fun. [[spoiler: Kara and Simon meet a former park ranger whose entire lower body has been unspooled, so that he's constantly sitting in his own intestines, and this ''didn't kill him''.]]
18	* CampGay: Simon the barista. Kara is often frustrated that he's always prettier than her.
19	* CapitalLettersAreMagic: The words Them and Willows need to be pronounced with capital letters for the full effect.
20	* ChekhovsGun: The taxidermy animals. [[spoiler: Particularly the giant otter and Prince.]]
21	* CleanCut: The marks They leave on those fortunate enough to be eaten are perfectly clean cones scooped out of people, without any blood.
22	* CollectorOfTheStrange: Kara's uncle collects the ''strangest'', and runs a museum of it. Though Kara notes that most of it is fake in one way or another.
23	* CombatTentacles: A particular gory version. [[spoiler: Sturdivant grapples the giant otter with his own intestines, which he can control like limbs, to save Kara.]]
24	* ContrastingSequelSetting: An interesting variation in relation to The Twisted Ones, Kingfisher's horror novel from the previous year. Both books are set in North Carolina, in strange houses (a hoarder house and a taxidermy museum, respectively) in towns within a few hours' drive of Southern Pines, but while the house in The Twisted Ones is steeped with Mouse's late grandmother's awfulness, Kara notes early on that while the Museum could be creepy, it isn't: “Uncle Earl's basic kindness infused every corner of his beloved museum."
25	* DemonicPossession: Even after they escape the willow world the first time, and put a patch on the hole, Kara keeps on sleepwalking to try and literally claw her way back through the wall. It eventually affects Simon too. [[spoiler: It is the influence of the Corpse Otter.]] Additionally [[spoiler: The Corpse Otter can possess the [[TaxidermyTerror animated taxidermy]] by clawing its way inside them.]]
26	* DesperationAttack: [[spoiler: When the Corpse Otter casts a mass awakening on the objects in the museum. Kara speculates it didn't do it before because it really hurt, or cost years of its 'life' or similar. But she had managed to ''really'' piss it off.]]
27	* DramaticIrony: The vaguely slimy carving that has an otter on one side and a human corpse on the other seems ominous from the start to the ''reader'', but Kara sees it as just another one of the probably-fake weird things the Wonder Museum is full of, and forgets all about it as soon as she finds a place for it. [[spoiler: So the keen-eyed reader will notice the hole is behind the case she put the corpse otter in, but ''she'' doesn't realize for a while.]]
28	* EldritchAbomination: The beings known only as Them. They're huge, usually invisible, indescribable, and They rotate people out of reality, eat them, and transform them for fun.
29	* KillItWithFire: Invoked but shot down. Kara suggests just torching the Museum and running, but Simon points out that damaging the wall makes the hole grow, so they ''really'' don't want to know what happens if the entire wall is destroyed. [[spoiler: It probably would have sealed itself, as portals in the air do, but they had no way to know that at the time.]]
30	** Used offscreen though, [[spoiler: to destroy the Willow incursion on the Danube. But the Corpse Otter didn't burn, which is why he sent it away instead.]]
31	* KilledMidSentence: The ApocalypticLog [[spoiler: doesn't have an end. As Kara notes, it's not like Bible guy was going to stop during his escape to write down that he was escaping, and if They got him, he wouldn't be ''able'' to.]]
32	* MorphicResonance: [[spoiler: The Corpse Otter has limited control of the taxidermy it brings to life... until it moves into the Giant Otter and finds that it ''really'' fits in well.]]
33	* MundaneSolution: Sealing the portals in natural substances is actually fairly simple once you know the trick. [[spoiler: You fill them in with whatever was there before. Portals in the air close naturally, and in the ground they can be closed just by kicking in dirt.]] Walls are more complicated though, [[spoiler: since a patch ''over'' the portal doesn't do anything. It takes some creative use of mortar.]]
34	* NewAgeRetroHippie: Kara's uncle is one. He believes firmly in Aliens, Bigfoot, and the healing power of crystals. He's also a devout Baptist, and sees no contradiction to this.
35	* OffscreenTeleportation: The Willows move when you aren't watching them.
36	* PoliceAreUseless: Initially, Kara and Simon don't call the police because Simon has an outstanding warrant for LSD possession. Later, they don't call the police because they don't think there's anything the police can do. And in any case the best case scenario is the entire town getting evacuated and made into a military base.
37	* PortalCrossroadWorld: The willow dimension is one, a 'backstage' area of reality that keeps opening portals to other worlds and dragging people in. [[spoiler: It's caused by the Willows themselves, thinning reality and sending out 'seeds' through the portals.]]
38	* PsychicPowers: Simon has strong intuition about creepy things and can sort of see Them even when They aren't in normal space, which he attributes to having his dead twin's eye (he absorbed her in the womb, uncommon but possible with fraternal twins). This saves his and Kara's bacon several times.
39	* TaxidermyTerror: Zig-zagged. Normally, Kara's not scared of the Wonder Museum's taxidermy animals; she grew up around them and considers them friends, especially her favorite, a giant deer head named Prince. [[spoiler: Which is why she's mad as hell when the willow-light invades and starts possessing them--but even then, only the possessed ones attack her. The other ones come alive too, but fight ''for'' her.]]
40	* ThoughtAversionFailure: Thinking about Them attracts Them to you. Unfortunately, knowing this makes it even harder ''not'' to think about Them, particularly when you can hear Them getting closer and know what They'll do. Kara semi-successfully distracts herself by singing "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" and dwelling on things that outrage her for most of the book, but the only really reliable way to blank out your thoughts is pain. [[spoiler: In a perverse way, this makes Kara's badly injured knee the thing that saves her.]]
41	* ThinkingUpPortals: While Kara takes awhile to catch on, it's no secret to the reader that the Corpse Otter is what opened the portal to the willow world. [[spoiler: It was sent to this world as a seed by the Willows, to open up ways that would let their roots in. When it was initially found it had made an entire island rotten with portals.]]
42	* UncannyValley: Invoked; Kara notes that the alternate-universe schoolbus she and Simon find is the wrong yellow by just a few shades, and this is actually more jarring than it being a completely different color.
43	* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: The donor who sent the corpse otter to the Wonder Museum. [[spoiler: He knew exactly what it was, but he thought it would be powerless locked up away from any willows, which is why he sent it. Unfortunately, he was wrong.]]
44	* WhenTreesAttack: [[spoiler: The Willows]], who manage to be an existential threat to all of reality while never even moving. [[spoiler: When you can see them at least.]]

Context Literature / TheHollowPlaces