“A dark fairy tale about three sisters who fell through a crack in the world and met a monster who did something terrible to them.”

House of Hollow, by Krystal Sutherland

Summary

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. 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.

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.

My Thoughts

This book is everything you could ever want from a novel—gothic horror, magical realism, and lush, vivid botanical imagery on every page as our three main characters, each vivid and unique, trace their history back to its roots. I was not at all expecting where the story went, but it had me hooked; I think I read it in like three days, and this was during my study abroad in the UK for English Studies, where I already had a lot of reading. It’s creepy and grotesque and evocative at the same time. At the heart of the story is the twisted history between the three sisters, and the day they went missing, and then were found. It is revealed early on in the novel that the girls’ father did not believe that the three girls who returned were actually his daughters, and this belief drove him so crazy that he ended up taking his own life. The characterization is excellent, each of the three sisters unique: Iris, seventeen and disaffected, Viv, a rebellious rockstar with a shaved head, and Grey, a model, designer, and influencer with millions of dollars to her name. The story draws you in from the beginning, and this is one of the few novels I feel as though you can actually call atmospheric. It will elicit reactions as you read, drawing you further and further into the winding corners of the story. I do not want to spoil it, so I cannot say much, but the nightmarish, bizarre journey that ensues is truly worth reading. Sutherland draws heavily on lore about changelings, death, gateways to other worlds, loss, and grief, as well as personal power and responsibility. Their past catches up to the three girls in the best way, and the ending is both a satisfying wrap up and yet just open ended enough to leave you thinking about the book for weeks to come. I cannot recommend this novel more.

Review: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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