House of Hollows

By: Krystal Sutherland

Loction: FIC SUT

Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult, Thriler, Folktale!!!

"Something lurks in the shadows unseen in this Grimm inspired urban fairytale you won't be able to put down..." Robin

“I got you out," Grey said fiercely. "I gave you the life I promised you I would give you. I have no regrets. I want you to know that. I would do everything I did again, one hundred times over. When you are ready to talk to me, I will be waiting for you, because I am your sister.

In this life, and in the last.”

COVER LOVE!!!!

A dark, compelling contemporary thriller with a sinister folktale twist – think Gone Girl meets Two Can Keep A Secret by way of Stranger Things.

Iris Hollow and her two older sisters are unquestionably strange. Ever since they disappeared on a suburban street in Scotland as children only to return a month a later with no memory of what happened to them, odd, eerie occurrences seem to follow in their wake. And they’re changing. First, their dark hair turned white. Then, their blue eyes slowly turned black. They have insatiable appetites yet never gain weight. People find them disturbingly intoxicating, unbearably beautiful and inexplicably dangerous.

But now, ten years later, seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow is doing all she can to fit in and graduate high school on time – something her two famously glamorous globe-trotting older sisters, Grey and Vivi, never managed to do. But when Grey goes missing without a trace, leaving behind bizarre clues as to what might have happened, Iris and Vivi are left to trace her last few days. They aren’t the only ones looking for her though. As they brush against the supernatural they realise that the story they’ve been told about their past is unravelling and the world that returned them seemingly unharmed ten years ago, might just be calling them home.
 

A great review by Robin

House of Hollow is straight up one of the most unsettling books I have read in years. In just a few hundred pages, Sutherland tore me away from everything I know and love to grapple with an utterly grotesque mystery far unlike anything I have ever read before. This is an urban fairytale straight in the vein of the classic brothers Grimm stories. Terrifying, yet achingly beautiful. Each layer to the story unfolded to reveal something much more sinister, creating an unsteady ground for everything known and unknown thus far. The imagery and atmosphere present throughout each chapter are what lift the story during its darker moments, something I found myself clinging to like a life raft upon reaching the turning point in the novel. There really is nothing I can say specifically about the revelation to the whole mystery without being spoilery, other than it was completely brilliant and I will not be recovering from it anytime soon. Sutherland interweaves sisterhood with terror, in a story that makes you ultimately question just how far you would go to protect the ones you love. Lines are blurred until the reader is no longer able to truly question the morality behind each character's actions. Nothing prepared me for how unsettling that would be, like a dense fog wafting over everything until there is nothing left but the haunting resolution to the story. Having arrived at the all so distant shore, I must commend the amount of foreshadowing present that just went completely over my head. It really is ingenious on the author's part, but I was much too engrossed in the story to slow down and catalogue everything. Knowing there were so many breadcrumbs placed throughout though is certainly worth me rereading this at some point in the near future. This is a dark, twisted fantasy that will leave any reader regretting having not read it any sooner. Full of eerie language and middle places that will forever inhabit a place in their thoughts.

Trigger warnings: blood, gore, violence, murder, attempted murder, death, death of a loved one, self-harm, suicide, body horror, attempted sexual assault