One of the sad things about being an adult is that, when you find a strange portal to another world, it rarely takes you to a glorious adventure where you find a home that fits better than the world where you were born. When you’re an adult, those portals almost always take you to somewhere uncanny and possibly lethal. In spite of this near-truism I’ve just declared, humans just can’t seem to help themselves when we see a door that goes somewhere weird: we have to go through. Even though Kara and Simon know that the odd portal that opens up in the wall of Kara’s uncle’s Wonder Museum will probably take them someplace awful, they just have to explore. The Hollow Places, by the always amazing T. Kingfisher, tells us the story of what happens next.
Kara grew up with the Wonder Museum. She’d take admission and answer questions as a summer job with her delightful but frustrating uncle (who is willing to believe anything strange without even the tiniest bit of skepticism). Uncle Earl will put anything in his Wonder Museum: stuffed “Bigfoots,” taxidermy tableau (I imagine like this sort of thing), dubious artifacts, etc. Even though all the glass eyes are unsettling to most, Kara always took a kind of comfort in the place. When her marriage and life implode, she is more than willing to take her uncle’s offer of sanctuary.
Kara settles into a (hopefully) temporary existence at the museum until her uncle has to go in for surgery and strange things start to happen. Things start to move around at the museum. Then Kara discovers a big hole in the drywall on the second floor of the museum. Blaming it on a clumsy tourist, Kara calls in her friend Simon to help patch it. Before Simon can spackle over the gap, the pair discover a strange concrete hallway on the other side of the hole. Except, this hole defies physics. There’s no way there could be a concrete hallway behind the wall; there’s an apartment and a coffee shop on the other side of that wall. And, following our human compulsion to poke things with sticks and explore when we should maybe tactically retreat, Kara and Simon go through the gap in the wall.
And that’s when things get really weird.
I love T. Kingfisher’s ability to craft stories that feel like horror and fairy tale at the same time. There’s the high detail and emotional drama of horror, blended with the wonder of magic and fantasy. If the characters can figure out the rules of the story they’re in, they might be able to triumph over the forces of darkness, granting Kingfisher’s stories more hope of survival than most horror stories. Every time I finish a Kingfisher novel, I immediately want to get my hands on whatever tale she cooks up next.