Literature & Fiction
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House of Hollow
Darkly seductive, this twisty modern-day fairy tale by critically acclaimed author Krystal Sutherland is a gripping, terrifying journey where three sisters discover they are not all that they seem. Now in paperback.
Iris Hollow and her two older sisters are unquestionably strange. As children, they disappeared on a Scottish city street only to return a month later with no memory of what had happened to them or where they'd been. More troubling, their appearance began to change: their blue eyes now black, their dark hair now white. And as they grew older, odd, eerie occurrences seemed to follow in their wake. People find them disturbingly intoxicating, unbearably beautiful, and inexplicably dangerous.
Now seventeen-year-old Iris is doing all she can to fit in and graduate high school on time-something her two famous, glamorous, globe-trotting older sisters, Grey and Vivi, never managed to do. But when Grey goes missing, leaving behind bizarre clues as to her whereabouts, Iris and Vivi are left to find her-but they aren't the only ones looking. As they brush against the supernatural, Iris quickly realizes that the story she's been told about their past is unraveling and the world that returned them seemingly unharmed ten years ago might just be calling them back again.
Iris Hollow and her two older sisters are unquestionably strange. As children, they disappeared on a Scottish city street only to return a month later with no memory of what had happened to them or where they'd been. More troubling, their appearance began to change: their blue eyes now black, their dark hair now white. And as they grew older, odd, eerie occurrences seemed to follow in their wake. People find them disturbingly intoxicating, unbearably beautiful, and inexplicably dangerous.
Now seventeen-year-old Iris is doing all she can to fit in and graduate high school on time-something her two famous, glamorous, globe-trotting older sisters, Grey and Vivi, never managed to do. But when Grey goes missing, leaving behind bizarre clues as to her whereabouts, Iris and Vivi are left to find her-but they aren't the only ones looking. As they brush against the supernatural, Iris quickly realizes that the story she's been told about their past is unraveling and the world that returned them seemingly unharmed ten years ago might just be calling them back again.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for House of Hollow:
A 2022 International Thriller Writer Award Finalist
A 2022 Texas Tayshas Reading List Pick
A 2021 New York Public Library Best Book Pick
"Stepping nimbly among the liminal spaces and eerie real-world haunts of our heroine's cipher-sister, this haunting modern fairy tale will wrap you up like a glittering fog, before going for your throat." -Melissa Albert, New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood
★ "Sutherland keeps this haunting, contemporary fairy tale poised on the edge of gorgeous and gruesome, with visceral descriptions of sensual yet menacing magic hidden in the everyday. . . Hand this to your Nova Ren Suma and Melissa Albert fans." -Booklist, starred review
★ "This is slow-burn horror with imagery steeped in the senses . . . and Sutherland maximizes tension by playing into familiar tropes and then tearing away from them . . . The ending manages to be both horrific and heartbreaking . . . [with a] lingering chill." -The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, starred review
"Wonderfully creepy and full of unnerving supernatural flourishes." -PopSugar
"[Readers] will be eviscerated. . . Alive with lush language and a dark fairy tale feel, this is a compelling readalike for lovers of Holly Black's many wonderful fair folk standalones and series." -School Library Journal
"Smart and assured narration easily carries a fast-paced story entwining themes of grief and loss with elements of folklore and some very inventive body horror. The pervasive feeling of dread builds to a shocking twist. A lush and darkly twisted modern fairy tale." -Kirkus Reviews
"Filled with evocative detail, Sutherland's dark fantasy teems with eerie atmosphere . . . [in] Sutherland's carefully crafted fantasy world. Readers who are delighted by stories of the uncanny . . . will find themselves enchanted." -Publishers Weekly
"In House of Hollow, Krystal Sutherland turns her razor-sharp imagination to new horizons and proves, once again, that words blossom at her command. This story will steal up your spine, slip beneath your skin, and stick to you like honey." -Samantha Shannon, New York Times bestselling author of the Bone Season series and The Priory of the Orange Tree
"Filled with lush language and a fairy tale feel, this horror story takes readers on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. . . Hand this to your readers who love Holly Black books and ...
A 2022 International Thriller Writer Award Finalist
A 2022 Texas Tayshas Reading List Pick
A 2021 New York Public Library Best Book Pick
"Stepping nimbly among the liminal spaces and eerie real-world haunts of our heroine's cipher-sister, this haunting modern fairy tale will wrap you up like a glittering fog, before going for your throat." -Melissa Albert, New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood
★ "Sutherland keeps this haunting, contemporary fairy tale poised on the edge of gorgeous and gruesome, with visceral descriptions of sensual yet menacing magic hidden in the everyday. . . Hand this to your Nova Ren Suma and Melissa Albert fans." -Booklist, starred review
★ "This is slow-burn horror with imagery steeped in the senses . . . and Sutherland maximizes tension by playing into familiar tropes and then tearing away from them . . . The ending manages to be both horrific and heartbreaking . . . [with a] lingering chill." -The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, starred review
"Wonderfully creepy and full of unnerving supernatural flourishes." -PopSugar
"[Readers] will be eviscerated. . . Alive with lush language and a dark fairy tale feel, this is a compelling readalike for lovers of Holly Black's many wonderful fair folk standalones and series." -School Library Journal
"Smart and assured narration easily carries a fast-paced story entwining themes of grief and loss with elements of folklore and some very inventive body horror. The pervasive feeling of dread builds to a shocking twist. A lush and darkly twisted modern fairy tale." -Kirkus Reviews
"Filled with evocative detail, Sutherland's dark fantasy teems with eerie atmosphere . . . [in] Sutherland's carefully crafted fantasy world. Readers who are delighted by stories of the uncanny . . . will find themselves enchanted." -Publishers Weekly
"In House of Hollow, Krystal Sutherland turns her razor-sharp imagination to new horizons and proves, once again, that words blossom at her command. This story will steal up your spine, slip beneath your skin, and stick to you like honey." -Samantha Shannon, New York Times bestselling author of the Bone Season series and The Priory of the Orange Tree
"Filled with lush language and a fairy tale feel, this horror story takes readers on a rollercoaster ride of emotions. . . Hand this to your readers who love Holly Black books and ...
Readers Top Reviews
Polly Morgan
This book had me hooked from the first page. It is so beautifully written - haunting and eerie, yet reminiscent of a fairy-tale. Each hollow sister is cleverly developed with their own personality which jumps off the page. Grey is the ethereal one, confident and sharp. Vivi is angry and edgy, trying to hide from her uniqueness. Ivy is the academic, desperate to fade into the background. The whole book reads like a fever dream with a huge sense of foreboding. You can feel the danger closing in, but where it is coming from is unclear. I loved the references to the occult and changelings, and how the book explores beauty as a warning and a way to manipulate. This was such a brilliant read!
MISS C L INGRAMCa
This book was reminiscent of stranger things. Eerie set up, lots of mystery and some really tense moments. The story told in first person follows Iris, the youngest of three sisters, who had all gone missing for months when they were younger and turned back up with no memory. What happened when they were gone? I loved the GOT reference. It also reminded me a little of Mexican gothic. Creepy and weird so great for Halloween I did notice a few repetitions and story inaccuracies (well not inaccuracies as such more hiccups) interesting cast of characters. Overall it was ok not something I’d read again good if you like Mexican gothic style horror
Emily CharlotteGa
House of Hollow – 2.5/5 (rounded up to three for Goodreads) By Krystal Sutherland I genuinely wanted to like this book more than I did. The cover is enchanting and sent out vibes of a dark horror novel – which sadly it just was not. I felt this story was full of clichés – even the description of beauty was a the most overused stereotype in the world. Pale, thin, blonde and willowy. I rolled my eyes so hard they nearly rolled out of my head. I felt like this book was rushed out and not paced. The world building could have been magical, but I felt that the author was in such a rush to complete the book, it just wasn't explored. I was expecting some sort of dark Faerie tale, but I found that the certain horror elements of the tale were missing, whilst others were overused! I mean, all we ever heard about was the half man half bull with the skull mask who stank of the rotting earth. It just fell short of my expectations, for a YA horror maybe I just expected too much?
Kari MeekKari Mee
What an outstanding darkly gothic novel. I wanted this family to be whole again and not so fractured after the three young Hollow girls went missing but as you read on you’ll discover that that never was a possibility. The characters ponder a bewildering sense of self, how others see them and continue to question what exactly happened that night they went missing. Does anyone hold the answers to the truth? The three main characters’ are the the Hollow sisters, with Grey being the eldest and a supermodel, Vivi the middle child is tattooed and plays in a band and Iris the youngest, is still in high school ; determined to finish unlike her sisters. They are all so uniquely different from when they first went missing to when they returned. Their formerly blue eyes are now black, their once dark hair, now almost white and they seem to have unspoken strange abilities that are never discussed. Their parents were so distraught during their month long abduction, only to be found alive and naked right where they disappeared from. Their father grows increasingly mad, thinking that these are not his same children. His mental health is deteriorating. As the girls get older, their relationship with their mother begins to suffer and they move out sooner than they should be leaving; Iris, the youngest still at home. With Grey having absolutely no relationship with her mom. What really happened? But despite being apart; the girls can sense each other by feeling, the ability they gained after their abduction and of course by keeping in regular contact. But when Grey goes missing, they don’t know if it’s related to an obsessed fan or possibly to the night they went missing all those years ago.
AlixMegan Richard
3.5 stars The House of Hollow is a unique folk horror story that deals with nature, death, beauty, and decay. The story revolves around sisters Iris and Vivi searching for their missing sister Grey. There’s also a whole mystery surrounding their childhood where they went missing for a month and miraculously came back with no memories of what happened to them. So they say. Despite the intriguing premise, things don’t really start to pick up until the second half. The first half is spent looking for Grey and it’s quite obvious where she is and how to find her, but the sisters are quite slow to the uptake which was frustrating. It’s also very predictable who the villain is. The second half is when things get really freaky and dark though. I was satisfied with the reveal and how the story ended. Overall, The House of Hollow is a dark fairy tale that really hits its stride in the second half.
Short Excerpt Teaser
PROLOGUE
I was ten years old the first time I realized I was strange.
Around midnight, a woman dressed in white slipped through my bedroom window and cut off a lock of my hair with sewing scissors. I was awake the whole time, tracking her in the dark, so frozen by fear that I couldn't move, couldn't scream.
I watched as she held the curl of my hair to her nose and inhaled. I watched as she put it on her tongue and closed her mouth and savored the taste for a few moments before swallowing. I watched as she bent over me and ran a fingertip along the hook-shaped scar at the base of my throat.
It was only when she opened my door-bound for the bedrooms of my older sisters, with the scissors still held at her side- that I finally screamed.
My mother tackled her in the hall. My sisters helped hold her down. The woman was rough and rabid, thrashing against the three of them with a strength we'd later learn was fueled by amphetamines. She bit my mother. She headbutted my middle sister, Vivi, so hard in the face that her nose was crushed and both of her eye sockets were bruised for weeks.
It was Grey, my eldest sister, who finally subdued her. When she thought my mother wasn't looking, she bent low over the wild woman's face and pressed her lips against her mouth. It was a soft kiss right out of a fairy tale, made gruesome by the fact that the woman's chin was slick with our mother's blood.
For a moment, the air smelled sweet and wrong, a mixture of honey and something else, something rotten. Grey pulled back and held the woman's head in her hands, and then watched her, intently, waiting. My sister's eyes were so black, they looked like polished river stones. She was fourteen then, and already the most beautiful creature I could imagine. I wanted to peel the skin from her body and wear it draped over mine.
The woman shuddered beneath Grey's touch and then just . . . stopped.
By the time the police arrived, the woman's eyes were wide and faraway, her limbs so liquid she could no longer stand and had to be carried out, limp as a drunk, by three officers.
I wonder if Grey already knew then what we were.
***
The woman, the police would later tell us, had read about us on the internet and stalked us for several weeks before the break-in.
We were famous for a bizarre thing that had happened to us three years earlier, when I was seven, a thing I couldn't remember and never thought about but that apparently intrigued many other people a great deal.
I was keyed into our strangeness after that. I watched for it in the years that followed, saw it bloom around us in unexpected ways. There was the man who tried to pull Vivi into his car when she was fifteen because he thought she was an angel; she broke his jaw and knocked out two of his teeth. There was the teacher, the one Grey hated, who was fired after he pressed her against a wall and kissed her neck in front of her whole class. There was the pretty, popular girl who had bullied me, who stood in front of the entire school at assembly and silently began to shave her own head, tears streaming down her face as her dark locks fell in spools at her feet.
When I found Grey's eyes through the sea of faces that day, she was staring at me. The bullying had been going on for months, but I'd only told my sisters about it the night before. Grey winked, then returned to the book she was reading, uninterested in the show. Vivi, always less subtle, had her feet up on the back of the chair in front of her and was grinning from ear to ear, her crooked nose wrinkled in delight.
Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters.
We each had black eyes and hair as white as milk. We each had enchanting four-letter names: Grey, Vivi, Iris. We walked to school together. We ate lunch together. We walked home together. We didn't have friends, because we didn't need them. We moved through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around us, whispering behind our backs.
Everyone knew who we were. Everyone had heard our story. Everyone had their own theory about what had happened to us. My sisters used this to their advantage. They were very good at cultivating their own mystery like gardeners, coaxing the heady intrigue that ripened around them into the shape of their choosing. I simply followed in their wake, quiet and studious, always embarrassed by the attention. Strangeness only bred strangeness, and it felt dangerous to tempt fate, to invite in the darkness that seemed already naturally drawn to us.
It didn'...
I was ten years old the first time I realized I was strange.
Around midnight, a woman dressed in white slipped through my bedroom window and cut off a lock of my hair with sewing scissors. I was awake the whole time, tracking her in the dark, so frozen by fear that I couldn't move, couldn't scream.
I watched as she held the curl of my hair to her nose and inhaled. I watched as she put it on her tongue and closed her mouth and savored the taste for a few moments before swallowing. I watched as she bent over me and ran a fingertip along the hook-shaped scar at the base of my throat.
It was only when she opened my door-bound for the bedrooms of my older sisters, with the scissors still held at her side- that I finally screamed.
My mother tackled her in the hall. My sisters helped hold her down. The woman was rough and rabid, thrashing against the three of them with a strength we'd later learn was fueled by amphetamines. She bit my mother. She headbutted my middle sister, Vivi, so hard in the face that her nose was crushed and both of her eye sockets were bruised for weeks.
It was Grey, my eldest sister, who finally subdued her. When she thought my mother wasn't looking, she bent low over the wild woman's face and pressed her lips against her mouth. It was a soft kiss right out of a fairy tale, made gruesome by the fact that the woman's chin was slick with our mother's blood.
For a moment, the air smelled sweet and wrong, a mixture of honey and something else, something rotten. Grey pulled back and held the woman's head in her hands, and then watched her, intently, waiting. My sister's eyes were so black, they looked like polished river stones. She was fourteen then, and already the most beautiful creature I could imagine. I wanted to peel the skin from her body and wear it draped over mine.
The woman shuddered beneath Grey's touch and then just . . . stopped.
By the time the police arrived, the woman's eyes were wide and faraway, her limbs so liquid she could no longer stand and had to be carried out, limp as a drunk, by three officers.
I wonder if Grey already knew then what we were.
***
The woman, the police would later tell us, had read about us on the internet and stalked us for several weeks before the break-in.
We were famous for a bizarre thing that had happened to us three years earlier, when I was seven, a thing I couldn't remember and never thought about but that apparently intrigued many other people a great deal.
I was keyed into our strangeness after that. I watched for it in the years that followed, saw it bloom around us in unexpected ways. There was the man who tried to pull Vivi into his car when she was fifteen because he thought she was an angel; she broke his jaw and knocked out two of his teeth. There was the teacher, the one Grey hated, who was fired after he pressed her against a wall and kissed her neck in front of her whole class. There was the pretty, popular girl who had bullied me, who stood in front of the entire school at assembly and silently began to shave her own head, tears streaming down her face as her dark locks fell in spools at her feet.
When I found Grey's eyes through the sea of faces that day, she was staring at me. The bullying had been going on for months, but I'd only told my sisters about it the night before. Grey winked, then returned to the book she was reading, uninterested in the show. Vivi, always less subtle, had her feet up on the back of the chair in front of her and was grinning from ear to ear, her crooked nose wrinkled in delight.
Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters.
We each had black eyes and hair as white as milk. We each had enchanting four-letter names: Grey, Vivi, Iris. We walked to school together. We ate lunch together. We walked home together. We didn't have friends, because we didn't need them. We moved through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around us, whispering behind our backs.
Everyone knew who we were. Everyone had heard our story. Everyone had their own theory about what had happened to us. My sisters used this to their advantage. They were very good at cultivating their own mystery like gardeners, coaxing the heady intrigue that ripened around them into the shape of their choosing. I simply followed in their wake, quiet and studious, always embarrassed by the attention. Strangeness only bred strangeness, and it felt dangerous to tempt fate, to invite in the darkness that seemed already naturally drawn to us.
It didn'...
