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The Language of the Night: Evil in "The Hollow Places" [1]

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Date: 2023-10-30  

Third of a series, tonight we finish up T. Kingfisher’s Southern horror (until she writes another one) with The Hollow Places. There’s a lot of horror in this novel, and most of it I’m not going to discuss, because I’m looking at these books as Southern first and horror second. (Don’t fret — it’s Halloween eve, so of course there has to be some discussion of That Which Is Undeniably Creepy. We’ll get there.) Part one about A House with Good Bones is here, and part two, The Twisted Ones, is here.

A House with Good Bones addressed the “Southern Lady” as a social role and construct, especially as wicked grandmother envisioned it. To the grandmother who most certainly doesn’t love her children or grandchildren as much as she exists to terrorize and control them, the stereotypical Southern matriarchal role, informed by Margaret Mitchell and Tennessee Williams (Gone with the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire respectively), is to be embraced and emulated, and by God, she’s going to enforce that role even if she has to do it from the grave. If grandma is Old South, then Mom is New South — colorful, welcoming of a drink in the evening and embarrassed by the Lost Cause mania.

The Twisted Ones features another wicked grandmother, but this one stays (mostly) dead and unrepentantly awful. Instead of taking on the traditional Old South paradigm, Kingfisher explores the Appalachian folk side of the South, with a side of new Southerners — the artists and hippies who took to the hills in the 1970s and ‘80s. This is the South of witches and cultural traditions that come from the the hollers of Great Britain and put down roots in the hollers of the Appalachians. The hoarding and the distant small town with a coffee shop, a grocery and a hardware store, are staples of rustbelt America.

The Hollow Places flips the situation — instead of a house in the woods with precious few neighbors, the novel is set, when it isn’t in the alternate world of the willows, in Hog Chapel, North Carolina:

Every now and then the small-business bureau suggests changing the name from Hog Chapel to something more enticing, but it never passes. Who wants to live in Pinestraw or Pine Needle or Happy Pines or Sunset Pines anyway? pp. 11-12

Hog Chapel is a small town that “would love to be like the town of Southern Pines, an hour east, but can’t sustain quite so much quaintness” (p. 11). All the references to pines offers a clue about the nature of the area — there are whole stretches of North Carolina where you can drive on a two-lane road for an hour and see nothing but pine trees; historically, this was yellow pine country but Weyerhaeuser brought in paper mills after the old growth was stripped out, and . . . nothing but pines. Anyway, the town can support “one coffee shop, one diner, a hardware store, and two junk stores with pretensions of being antique shops” (p. 12). And a private museum, the “Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy,” which pays tribute to, as Kingfisher writes in the afterword,

a dozen fascinating little museums that I have visited over the years. I love few things so much as an incredibly earnest tiny museum that is deeply passionate about its focus and wants to tell you all about it. The Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque; the Museum of Creation, Taxidermy and Tools and the sadly now-defunct Serpentarium in my own North Carolina; the Mothman Museum in West Virginia; the Voodoo Museum in New Orleans and, down the street, the Pharmacology Museum; the Museum of English Rural Life; and possibly the single most earnest place on earth, the Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, are all profound delights of my heart. pp. 354-355

There’s something irresistibly Southern about small museums in the South. I know, there are museums everywhere but, well, one of those things about the South is that sense of memory, of history, that sinks into your bones, and makes going to weird little museums positively pleasurable. That said, The Hollow Places is probably the least consciously Southern of the three novels. That may be because so much of the book takes place in another world, but the town of Hog Chapel is the anchor that keeps the novel grounded.

Being that there’s no nasty grandmother in The Hollow Places, and a mom with whom the protagonist has decided that keeping an ideal distance of two hundred miles is optimal for domestic harmony, there’s no malevolent elder who figures in the story. Instead, we have Uncle Earl, owner of the Wonder Museum and a person with a bad knee and profound love for everyone and everything.

Uncle Earl believes strongly in Jesus, Moses, the healing power of crystals, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, that aliens landed at Roswell but the government is suppressing it, secret histories, faith-healing, snake-handling, that there is an invention that will replace gasoline but the oil companies are suppressing it, chemtrails, demon-possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and that there’s proof that aliens contacted the Mayans and the Aztecs and probably the Egyptians, but the scientists are suppressing it. He believes in Skunk Ape, Chupacabras, and he positively adores Mothman. He is not Catholic, but he believes in the miracle of Fatima, visions of Mary appearing on toast, and he is nearly positive that the end times are upon us, but sees to be okay with this, provided it does not interfere with museum hours. p. 3

All three of Kingfisher’s Southern horror novels feature a protagonist who is a woman, not a child, in her thirties or forties, and each with a profession that’s portable. Mouse, in The Twisted Ones, is a freelance editor, while Sam in A House with Good Bones is an archaeologist on hiatus while some human remains in a dig get cleared up. And Kara, nicknamed Carrot, in The Hollow Places, is a freelance graphic designer whose marriage just ended and is considering bunking at the YMCA except it has a waiting list, when Uncle Earl offers her a job and a room at the museum.

Each of the protagonists in the three books is also a local who left home and made a life away from the South. That narrative distance makes the regionalism more comprehensible, as the viewpoint character has to reintegrate into the culture.

Now, a taxidermy museum is a weird place, but to Carrot it’s home. It’s also a place her ex didn’t like, so “all my memories of the Wonder Museum were good ones without him in it” (p. 10). And Uncle Earl’s offer isn’t really charity; he needs help, and his bad knee needs some serious help, which leaves Carrot in charge while he recuperates elsewhere. Carrot is running the museum when things start to get seriously weird, starting with the acquisition of a carved figure that on one side is a shrouded corpse, and on the reverse is an otter, and in short order, Uncle Earl is sidelined and a hole opens up in a wall that leads to a place that is most definitely not Hog Chapel.

Carrot’s partner in unwilling adventure is Simon, the gay barista who runs the coffee shop that shares the building with the museum. Simon, who dresses like “a thrift-store Mad Hatter, with fingerless gloves and strange hats,” is a fearless bestie for Carrot, can brew a mean cup of coffee, and possesses both excellent tequila and an eye that can see “some weird shit.” That last ability comes in handy when navigating the willow world, where much of the book takes place. Like the “tiny organic farmers looking for cheap land, and extremely earnest hippies who want to talk to you about biodiesel” (p. 11) — and I can hold forth about both types at length, out gay men who thrive in small towns is part of the new South (yes, I know gay men have always lived in small Southern towns, but the sense of thriving is somewhat new).

Being a portal novel — like Narnia, only terrifying — Hog Chapel fades into the background in favor of the willows and the river, and the things that come from behind reality. The willow world is a passage to other parallel worlds, and some of the people who have visited have gotten stuck there. In a variety of ways.

There are two types of evil that Carrot and Simon encounter — one is the willows, seeking to get their roots into different worlds, and nearly succeeding — and the other are the things behind the sky, the things that can hear you if you think of them, the things that you have to hope are hungry when they catch you because there are things worse than death, and they’re in among the willows.

The randomness, the impersonality of the evil in The Hollow Places is different from the malice in Kingfisher’s other Southern horror novels. On one level, the menace of the willows is comprehensible — driven by a spirit caught in a carving that only wants to go home — but it’s the other evil, the evil of Them randomly opening holes in different worlds and either eating or experimenting on whoever happens to blunder through — that’s the one that I’ve been pondering. When the otter carving animates the taxidermied animals in the museum, it’s trying to get back to its home, something anyone can sympathize with, even though it raises hell and genuine menace for Carrot. It’s reasonable, which echoes a sentiment voiced by Ed in Digger,

Evil is having reason. always. Many and many. If hunter beats mate, has reason. Always. Mate is lazy, burning food, is stupid, is speaking on and on. Is always being a reason . . . . Evil is still being — is having reason — being reasonable! . . . Is punishing world for not being … like in head. Is always reason. World should be different, is reason. p. 274

The “They,” the ones who travel behind the sky, don’t have any discernible reason for what they do. Their malice is random, incomprehensible, which chimes in my mind with a comment I heard but have spent a few hours unsuccessfully trying to locate (damn you, Tiktok!) by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who said something to the effect that we might be extremely stupid to be broadcasting our address out to the universe, because any alien life form who turns up would be much more advanced technologically than we are. Looking back on our history, when one culture meets another less advanced one, the less advanced culture has fared poorly, has been slaughtered, enslaved, robbed of resources, etc. He mused that, when we consider extraterrestrial life with trepidation, are we really looking at ourselves and reflecting on our own history? Would our Close Encounter not look more like Carrot and Simon trying to escape from Them than it would resemble E.T. on sabbatical?

How to counter this kind of terror and random evil? Carrot finds the answer in the museum:

But perhaps skin and bones have a little memory to them, even after the soul is gone to greater things. And the bones in the museum had spent decade after decade marinating in my uncle’s fierce, befuddled kindness. . . . The malice of the next world over was profound, but it faltered before Uncle Earl’s influence. When the bones woke, they woke as objects that had been loved for many years. Who am I to say that such objects, given brief life, would not fight to defend their home. Who am I to say that Prince could not recognize a child who had loved him and try to save her? p. 348

Here’s hoping that all our briefly living bones are marinating in befuddled kindness and love. Happy Halloween.

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