Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we cover the first two chapters of T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places, first published in 2020. Spoilers ahead—but we strongly recommend reading along!
“A man who had devoured his twin in the womb and was now carrying her eye around in his head was pitying me. That seemed as if it should be a good metaphor for my life, although I’d be damned if I could make sense of it.”
When Kara tells people her uncle Earl owns a museum, they never believe her. Their doubt dwindles when she admits it’s a tiny storefront museum in Hog Chapel, North Carolina; it burgeons again when she tells them the museum’s name: The Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy.
Kara’s classmates used to ask if she found the museum creepy, but it’s her second home. As a teenager, she worked summers behind the counter and among the packed aisles of fake shrunken heads, Barong masks actually from Bali and Clovis points actually chipped out by hand (if not thousands of years ago), and absolutely genuine taxidermy and osseous relics. The Feejee Mermaid, fur-bearing trout and jackalopes may be (are) composite frauds, but there are plenty of real dead animals in varying states of preservation: deer and antelope and boar heads, a moth-chewed and broke-legged grizzly bear, stuffed birds and dried scorpions and armor-clad mice astride cane toads. A giant Amazonian river otter is the star of the collection.
Uncle Earl is himself a natural believer. He believes in Jesus, healing crystals, Roswell aliens suppressed by the government, snake-handling, gasoline replacements suppressed by oil companies, demonic possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, the Skunk Ape and Chupacabras and especially Mothman and Bigfoot. He’s nearly convinced the end times cometh soon, but that’s fine with him as long as they don’t interfere with museum hours. The saving grace: Earl doesn’t try to impose his beliefs on others. Why would he? He likes just about everyone he’s ever met, and they like him in return.
Sixteen-year-old Kara, whom Earl calls Carrot, convinced him of the truth of evolution—though he’s dubious about being descended from apes, only evolution can explain Bigfoot. Eighteen years to the day after Earl’s enlightenment, Kara’s marriage ends.
There’s no revelation of infidelity, no violence, just a knot tied too young and “a long, slow slide into comfortable misery.” With uncertain freelance graphic design income and no health insurance, Kara can’t afford to keep the house even when Mark offers. She packs the few things she wants to keep, mostly books, crying too often. The horror of moving back in with her mother looms; they love each other but their relationship thrives on distance. Then, deus ex museum, uncle Earl calls. He’s just happened to clean out the spare room, and she’s welcome to stay while she sorts things out. Besides, he’s gotten gouty and would welcome help.
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The Hollow Places
Kara accepts his offer and heads to Hog Chapel. She’s moved to find that Earl’s painted her room a warm yellow and hung Prince on the wall opposite a charmingly ornate four-poster bed. Not Prince the musician—Prince the Roosevelt elk, or at least his mounted head with its awesome spread of antlers. Six-year-old Kara identified the elk with Bambi’s father, the Prince of the Forest, and she’s loved it ever since.
Next morning Kara rouses herself for the Museum’s 9AM opening. Earl’s gotten Krispy Kreme doughnuts to welcome her back to the South. He asks her to fetch coffee from the cafe next door, and she realizes he’d rather not make the short walk himself. In addition to the gout, he wears a back brace and is obviously in more pain than he’ll admit.
Earl owns the building that houses both Museum and the Black Hen coffee shop, where Simon has been the barista for a decade. Nearly forty, he looks about eighteen and dresses like “a thrift-store Mad Hatter.” He commiserates about Kara’s divorce, then tells her the news about his left eye. Turns out it’s afflicted with a form of color-blindness only women get, so Simon must be a chimera who ate his female twin in the womb! Sometimes he sees weird shit with that eye. Kara wonders if he sees weird shit in the Museum, but given it’s already full of weird shit, how would he know?
Back in the Museum, Kara decides her first big job will be cataloging its contents, a task Earl’s never undertaken. Spreadsheets, photos, labels… she starts with Prince, affixing a sticker to the back of his plaque inscribed #1.
“That’s one down,” she mutters. “Another couple million to go.”
Anne’s Commentary
If there’s any fictional setting I find more alluring than a tome-stocked bookstore, it’s a curiosity emporium that could be more candidly described as a junk shop. But a good junk shop, a helluva junk shop, which Uncle Earl’s establishment decidedly is. He calls it a museum. That could be a ludicrous (or mildly fraudulent) label, except that Earl believes it’s a museum, and Earl’s capacity for belief is itself a Natural Wonder. I mean, Earl likes pretty much everyone he meets, in person and online, and has faith they’ll all come to the Lord in time to avoid hellfire.
That’s a wonder, all right, but an endearing one. No wonder Kara jumps at the chance to hunker down at Earl’s after a divorce low on drama but high on financial angst. Kingfisher has chosen her narrator well. Kara is predisposed to the museum by her lifelong attachment to both it and its proprietor. More skeptical and organized than her uncle—his ideal business partner—she’s nonetheless curious and imaginatively receptive to the whimsical and bizarre miscellany that is stock in trade of the Wonder Museum.
She is also in need of new digs, and the freer the better. Given Kara can count her museum chores as a labor of love as much as rent-via-labor, digs don’t come freer than Earl’s spare room. A huge added inducement for Kara (as it would be for many of us): There’s a coffee shop attached to the building, the barista is sympathetic, and the coffee is both great and gratis. So when things go hideously south at the Museum—and we know by the genre that they must—Kara has reasonable motives to stay on. In more or less ascending order of persuasion:
- She won’t find a cheaper alternative.
- Except Mom’s, and living with Mom means fighting with Mom.
- Simon’s next door, and she likes Simon.
- The Museum itself is a second home, quirky but comforting.
- From the start, Uncle Earl needs her help to run the place. Later, there’s no way she can abandon him to the things going hideously south. Nor can she abandon the neighborhood. Or the city, the state, the country, perhaps all Earthly life as we know it.
So—and this is important to me as a reader—I’m not forehead-butting my Kindle screen to shards because this dumbass character is staying in the Scary-And-Dangerous Place because the plot demands that SOMEONE be that much of a dumbass; otherwise, the Scary-And-Dangerous Things wouldn’t have anyone to Scare-And-Endanger.
Have you ever noticed that there’s a certain type of writer who caps words in direct proportion to how much of a pet peeve she’s writing about? Not that I’ve ever noticed any such thing, just wondering.
To recap, without caps. In her first two chapters, Kingfisher has powerfully hooked me with her setting, and a narrator with both engaging voice and adequate reasons to stick around and narrate. Kara’s divorce sends her to the cool setting, but isn’t so agonizing a development that it detracts from the plot. The other principal characters are equally engaging. In my experience, people like to characterize individuals with troubling beliefs as that uncle you have to put up with at Thanksgiving. I would put up with Uncle Earl for a full year of Thanksgivings, since he so amiably tempers his wacko ideas with tolerance and good humor. Simon—
Come on, Simon is a chimera! That’s in the biological sense of the word: an organism containing genetically mixed tissues created by embryonic fusion, grafting or mutation. It’s embryonic fusion for Simon, who’s apparently absorbed a female twin and so “inherited” her color-blind left eye. His optometrist got very excited. We readers can get even more excited when Simon adds that while his left eye is chromatically challenged (does this in part explain his wardrobe?), it sometimes sees “weird shit.” A friend with extraordinary sensory perception is likely to come in handy for Kara in her inevitable tribulations as co-proprietor of a junk shop (sorry, museum) in a dark fantasy novel.
About the taxidermatological exhibits in Earl’s collection. I think Kara’s classmates were justified in being creeped out. Now, poorly done taxidermy is more tacky-sad than scary. Well-done taxidermy—that is, taxidermied creatures that actually fool the eye into thinking they’re alive—those can be damn unnerving. Mounted body parts invite speculation on where the rest of their former owners may be. Embedded in the walls? Caught in a neighboring dimension? Full-body “stuffies” you really have to watch. Maybe that grizzly is just pretending to be dead and mounted. Maybe the minute you turn your back, it will bite your head off and put that on the wall. Remember Lovecraft and Heald’s “Horror in the Museum”? How some of the so-called waxwork monsters were actually taxidermied monsters? How the ultimate monster-god Rhan-Tegoth remained as motionless as a waxwork or a stuffy only because It required sustenance to awaken?
Kara might have read “The Horror in the Museum,” because Lovecraft is one of the authors whose books she rescues from the ruins of her marriage. If she did read it, could she have resisted comparing the madman Jones’s museum with uncle Earl’s?
If so, no problem for her. Earl’s enthusiasm for monsters is innocent, having only led to his collection of Mothman posters and Bigfoot videos. He acquires his specimens from flea markets, estate sales and the internet, not from ice-buried prehuman ruins in the Alaskan wilderness. He would never sacrifice dogs, or tourists, to evil extraterrestrial gods. He and Kara are perfectly safe in the quirky-yet-oddly-cozy storefront in Hog Chapel, North Carolina.
Right? Right. If nothing else, the Wonder Museum has a whole wall of Thimbles of the World as talismanic protection against preternatural incursions, and that’s got to put the Elder Sign to shame.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
The Hollow Places marks my turn to reread a favorite, noting resonances and clever foreshadowings that I tore through too quickly to notice the first time. It’s a riff on Blackwood masterpiece “The Willows,” and Kingfisher (grownup-fiction nom du plume for Ursula Vernon) recalls our review of Blackwood as her probable introduction to said story, so your hostesses are both extremely chuffed and spiraling into a vortex of self-referentiality.
This read-through, the first thing that jumps out at me is a break from the original Blackwood: where Blackwood’s adventurous young men (and Carson and Ford’s adventurous young women) paddle into wilderness seeking non-supernatural adventure, Kara isn’t anticipating adventure until the weirdness drops on her doorstep. Instead we open—as in The Haunting of Hill House—with the journey to that doorstep, and to the hope of a happier life away from an unpleasant relationship. We’re therefore set up for “Willows” remixed as some hybrid of haunted house and portal fantasy, with the Wonder Museum both comfort and danger.
Like Anne, I love the museum as our baseline setting. It’s a roadside attraction, offering tame weirdness to both visitors and readers: the sort of place you go when you want your sense of reality turned upside down just a little, and comfort food in a diner afterwards. Mystery spots, giant balls of yarn, wunderkammer large and small… these are the stuff of the American gothic, and I don’t know whether I’m looking in the wrong places or whether they’re legitimately underutilized in weird fiction.1 (Why has Atlas Obscura not yet put out an anthology of stories inspired by their catalogued attractions, is what I’m asking.) But for Kara, the museum is an unquestionably safe refuge. The weirdness isn’t weird to her, and the taxidermied animals are old friends. She can wake up confident in her location, reality reassuringly absolute—making the contrast with what’s to come all the harsher.
Museums do appear on a regular basis in weird and fantastic fiction, and my appetite on this front is basically insatiable.2 Modest or gargantuan, fruits of single obsessive collectors or institutions staffed like universities, they offer giant piles of shiny knowledge, tangible evidence of deep time, and a reminder that our most everyday experiences will someday confuse archaeologists. They also provide excuse for just about any object you might need to touch off your plot. Their keepers can be experts in whatever obscure subject requires explaining, and the non-plot-related collections provide endless background color. Our column has so far visited the Parrington, the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, and the Rogers Museum. The Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy makes a worthy addition.
People as much as place provide Kara’s comfortable baseline. Uncle Earl is weird and kind and believes in all the things. (Possibly making it easy for all the things to show up in his little corner of reality, oh dear.) Simon is weird and friendly and sees strange things out of his chimerical eye (kind of like Blackwood’s unnamed Swede, oh dear). One of the things I adore about Kingfisher’s writing is the way all her relationships are so thoroughly themselves, and so thoroughly unmistakable for any other kind of relationship. Kara’s fraught interactions with her mother are instantly recognizable, as is her ease with Earl. Her friendship with Simon is a delight, and is very clearly deep friendship with no hint of romance. (And boy, can Kingfisher write a romance when she wants to. Though where her horror books tend to start out gentle, the romances often have more blood up front.) The relationships provide another solid foundation to contrast with the extremely un-solid universe in which Kara is soon to learn that she lives.
This Week’s Metrics
The Degenerate Dutch: Kara keeps trying to get Uncle Earl to either put a label on the Feejee Mermaid explaining the cultural context, or just rename the thing.
Weirdbuilding: Looking back at our “Willows” review, I recall the importance of river otters, or things that might be mistaken for river otters. And here’s the Wonder Museum’s “truly amazing” taxidermied river otter, right on cue. Also a kayak paddle.
Libronomicon: Kara spends a good part of this section dealing with the horrors of moving a giant collection of books, combined with the horrors of determining custody of said books in a divorce. She’s taking the Pratchett, dammit, along with the Lovecraft (of course) and the Bear. (Based on her other tastes, I’m guessing Elizabeth rather than Greg.) Mark gets the P.K. Dick.
The commentary about disturbing animal books ostensibly for kids, Watership Down versus Bambi, is possibly not unrelated to the author writing her own animal books for kids (as Ursula Vernon, in that case).
Spring is coming, and we’re enjoying watching all the birds coming back. Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds,” that is. You can find it most easily in her The Birds and Other Stories collection.
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
[1]Yes, I’ve read American Gods. And been to the House on the Rock.
[2]This past year has been the longest museum-less period of my life, and it’s probably going to show in these write-ups.
Aren’t men more likely to be colorblind?
There is no such thing as colour blindness affecting only women. The most common form (deuteranopia) is X-linked hence much more likely to affect men (about 5%), since women have a spare functioning X while men don’t. Other types of colour blindness are carried on somatic chromosomes (not sex chromosomes). I know that’s not the point of the story, but such a glaring rubbish statement is really distracting.
(credentials: ophthalmologist)
I should read along but I don’t know if I have the wherewithal to read T Kingfisher horror slowly and deliberately or more than once. I read this in an insomniac haze, clinging to the comforting idea that I was nowhere to near a weird museum or places with strang e holes in the wall.
I’m so excited for this read-along!
The afterword says that Uncle Earl’s museum wasn’t modeled on anywhere specific, just a love letter to small weird museums everywhere, but we visited the International Cryptozoology Museum of Portland ME in its former home, back when it was just 2 rooms crammed full of all manner of things, and, well, have a look, if you’re inclined.
I didn’t even get through Anne’s commentary before I rushed off to buy this.
Not Prince the musician—Prince the Roosevelt elk, or at least his mounted head with its awesome spread of antlers. I’m wondering if our author also has fond memories of the ‘critters’ from Disney’s Country Bear Jamboree.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Melvin,_Buff,_and_Max
It’s a great horror novel that can make you feel warm and protective towards the characters within the first few chapters. Looking forward to reading more!
Second paragraph says Hollow Ones instead of Hollow Places.
I think Kingfisher meant Simon has a rare condition called tetrachromacy. This is actually the opposite of color-blindness. Humans normally have four types of cones in our eyes, letting us see color. Colorblind people only have two. However, there are rare cases of people with four. This trait is associated with women who have one gene for color-blindness and a regular one. There’s an article on it and a woman who has it (and sees 100 million colors compared to the paltry 1 million us regular mortals are limited to).
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision
Technically, Simon could also be an XXY male, one with two XX chromosomes. Mammals have a thing called X-chromosome inactivation, which basically means, in different cells throughout our bodies, when more than one X chromosome is present, a gene in one will be be turned off while its matching gene on the other X chromosome will be turned on. This is why we can have odd numbered chromosomes for X without all the problems that happen when the other chromosomes don’t have a matching pair. So, Simon could also be like the rare cases of women who are color blind in one eye.
However, given the way that extra eye works over the course of the story, the devoured sister makes more sense.
By the way, this means Simon could also be color blind in the other eye. That is, he could have one eye that sees 100 times more color than the rest of us and another eye that sees 1/100. However, color blind people are supposed to be better at seeing things disguised by camouflage, and I’m assuming that would have played into the plot at some point (but it would be cool. . . .).
Gah, now I want to read this, and there’s a waitlist for the library audiobook. It’s got me extra nostalgic for my first career-launching job, at my college’s natural history museum. That museum’s beautiful dioramas and other exhibits are more evidence-backed and specialized than the museum collection in this story, but I’m thinking of the day when a colleague and I typed up someone’s old handwritten inventory of the specimen freezer’s contents. The list included creatures that don’t exist (e.g. “blue-throated green warbler”) and ambiguous entries like “hoofstock/legs,” “large lizard,” “black rodent,” and “fuzzy gray thing.” Despite severe depression, I was laughing uncontrollably, all but rolling on the floor.
Three. People normally have three cones. People with tetrachromacy have four. I, on the other hand, have at least one embarrassing typo per post (feal like I should add a typo or to just to prove my point).
(Why has Atlas Obscura not yet put out an anthology of stories inspired by their catalogued attractions, is what I’m asking.)
…because your book proposal hasn’t hit Samir Patel’s desk yet…?
Sigh. It started out so cheerfully…..
This has made my Friday. I’m more used to Kingfisher’s adventures, and the-women-shaped-like-the-real-world, so happy to spend my Kindle cash in another direction. And I have a positive fetish for small-time museums. Btw what kind of Kingfisher is T.? in my part of the world the Woodlands kingfisher is big, but not to big, and blue and beautiful.
@1jozi
She’s a belted kingfisher. :-) It’s the dominant/only kingfisher over much of North America, and if you’re used to common kingfishers, they’re huge!
And a PSA – Kingfishers’ latest, Paladin’s Strength, came out recently, a sequel to Paladin’s Grace.
Gah, I keep getting the titles of The Twisted Ones (Kingfisher’s other horror riff, this time on Machen) and The Hollow Places shuffled! Thanks to whoever fixed it.
@@@@@ 16 R. Emrys: LOL, the same thing happens to me!
I have and love both books, and every time I intend to reread one of them (which I have done in numerous occasions), I involuntarily get the wrong one. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
@15: Yeah. I once had to handle the corpse of a belted kingfisher, and I was surprised that she was so big, as I’d never seen one up close before.
Ashgrove @@@@@ 17: It doesn’t help that The Hollow Ones is a book by Guillermo Del Toro, and also an extremely emo group of mages in the old White Wolf World of Darkness role-playing setting.
I learn something new every single day and today that was…..one of my son’s favorite authors wrote this book! From Dragonbreath to this?!?! I’m shocked and amazed!
Also I read this book a few months ago and wow does it get strange and scary and gruesome. I loved it!
Shelly @@@@@ 20: It’s not uncommon in our house to have three people reading three very different Vernon/Kingfishers in parallel. At the moment, along with this one, we’re passing around Paladin’s Strength, and the kids are reading the second Hamster Princess book. Prolific authors are a great boon in troubled times!
I am pretty sure that a few years ago, Ursula posted to Twitter about a visit to a small quirky folksy museum, with photographs. I think there may even have been a hole in the actual wall. I don’t know if she decided to write a story about such a place, or if she had a story in mind first, and decided to visit a small quirky folksy museum as research.
I am pretty sure I am not hallucinating this, but I am not sure how to find old Twitter posts. Was it even called a museum? Maybe it was more like a House of Curiosities? Sigh.
R. Emrys @@@@@ 19: *FACEPALM*
I can’t say I’ve ever been unnerved by taxidermied animals, least of all the gorgeously realistic ones at the museum where I worked (see above). I’ve now started this book, and indeed I’m extra nostalgic for that museum. And for Jackalope, a fantabulous and beloved store I used to visit in Santa Fe,* whose vast array of goods sometimes included taxidermied faux jackalopes, some of them with wings.
I relate to Uncle Earl being comfortable with the internet but not with phone calls, and envy his easygoing attitudes toward his beliefs and other peoples’ beliefs, a source of endless angst for me. I can’t relate to Kara’s conflict-based relationship with her mother, and don’t envy it much — I don’t live with my mother most of the time, but in the years since I moved back to our hometown, we’ve grown so emotionally co-dependent that we hate to go even a day without seeing each other.
* https://jackalope.com/
BSFA shortlisted!