The Hollow Kind

No, that title isn't some clever headline I came up with to entice you to read my blog, although I do hope it had that effect.

THE HOLLOW KIND is the name of a novel by Andy Davidson. 

In my plan to catch up with the modern literary world since I more or less stopped writing (and reading) horror fiction more than a decade ago, I picked up a copy of THE HOLLOW KIND.

I don't know that I could have made a better choice.

I'm really bad with labels, but everyone tells me this is Southern Gothic Horror. Whatever it is, THE HOLLOW KIND is an excellent, engrossing horror tale, one of those novels that builds the suspense, the sense of dread and doom, as an evil slowly encircles the main characters, Nellie Gardener and her 11-year-old son, Max.

The two have come to an old family homestead in deep, hot, humid Georgia, she inherited from her grandfather. August Redfern. (Okay, maybe the book doesn't talk about the heat and humidity quite that much, those are just my memories of Georgia).

The homestead sits on 1,000 acres of mostly forested land, grown over with pines that spurred her grandfather to sink his lot into the land in the early 20^th century, hoping to become rich running a turpentine mill. For Nellie, the land and the remnants of the mill are of little consequence, other than it offers a refuge, a place she fled, with Max in tow, running from an abusive husband.

As the two work to spruce up the place, odd events begin to happen – events that soon slip from strange to dangerous to downright evil.

That evil inhabits the land, is an entity of its own, a creature of sorts which brought tragedy, repeatedly, to Nellie's family two generations earlier and set her grandfather on a course of battling that evil, alone, for decades. He had come there to marry and make his fortune – and it was within his grasp, but the land, the evil there, asked a price that was far too great for August to pay, thus he and his family fell victim to that evil, repeatedly.

Andy Davidson, the writer of this novel, deftly handles drifting back and forth between Nellie's time, in 1989, and her grandfather's time, which began at the farm in 1917 and moves well into the 20^th century, until Nellie meets the odd, lonely, possibly delusional man in the 1970s whcn she is a teenager dealing with the grief of losing her mother. While she and August were together a short time, a bond grew between them that remained, resulting in the old man leaving the house and land to her upon his death.

While that seemed like a blessing at the time, the house and land bring with it a curse, one that seems to inflict maximum damage and tragedy upon whoever it targets.

I've always admired writers who could switch back and forth between time periods, telling what is essentially two separate stories tied together by bloodlines and the evil that haunts the family grounds. Davidson does an excellent job with this. 

I think I read, or perhaps heard him on a podcast saying he had initially written the book as two separate tales – one telling the story of August Redfern and his years on the homestead, then segueing into Nellie's 1989 to pick up the story. Eventually, he – or maybe his editor – decided the story should be melded together, flipping back and forth. Whoa – mad respect to the writer for being able to essentially tear down the two stories and then put them back together as one larger work.

In any event, this was a fine horror novel, one I'd suggest to anyone who enjoys slowburn thrillrs which effectively build, piece by piece, to a satifsying climax, rather than rushing through to get to the end. In addition to the supernatural evil Nellie and Max face, there's plenty of small Southern town evil as well – a nasty local distant relative who has decided he will take that land at any cost, along with a few men with violent and bad intent way back in August Redfern's day. Davidson does a good job of blending all the story lines together in a novel that will keep you reading long after you should have gone to bed (or left for work) – a real page-turner.