THE HOLLOW KIND

A woman fleeing an abusive relationship carries her 11-year-old son to an even more dangerous place: home.

Greed, trespass, revenge, and obsession provide the emotional palette for this breathless, wide-eyed horror fable that chronicles the unforgivable trespasses that cost multiple generations their souls. The prime narrative finds Nellie Gardner in 1989 nursing wounds both fresh and long calloused as she shepherds her son, Max, to Georgia, well away from her abusive husband, Wade Gardner, an academic with an ill temper. In the same place circa 1917, Nellie’s grandfather August Redfern and his wife, Euphemia, launch a turpentine enterprise in the southern wilds and soon bear twins Charlie and Hank—Hank is Nellie’s father. But Redfern soon learns that the land he’s defiling in the name of profits demands more sacrifice than mere greed can satisfy. Settling into her grandfather’s creepy Gothic mansion, Nellie is soon confronted by local snake oil salesman Lonnie Baxter, who considers her property his birthright. But while a reunion with a newly sober Hank leads to an uneasy détente between father and daughter, Nellie and Max are also menaced by unpredictable phantoms, including the specter of a young girl, a dead bear who won’t seem to stay put, and the resurrected Dr. Gardner. Let’s face it, if you hang out in dusty old estates populated by long-kept secrets, guilt, remorse, and madness, something “squelching wetly,” as Stranger Things would put it, is bound to come slithering out of a hole. This version of the hot, wet South isn’t a far stretch from Daniel Woodrell’s twig-snap rustic dread but is a closer cousin to the wetwork terror of John Hornor Jacobs or Joe Hill. The way Davidson deftly pirouettes his way between bated-breath anticipation and a denouement that owes as much to John Carpenter as H.P. Lovecraft is impressive, especially given a staccato storytelling style that, much like a good horror movie, conceals as much as it reveals.

A folksy novel about bad country people, tentacles and all.