THE HOLLOW PLACES

A door to another world appears in a museum of oddities, but it’s no gateway to Narnia.

Rudderless after her divorce and terrified at the prospect of moving back in with her parents, 34-year-old Kara returns to where she grew up, quaint Hog Chapel, North Carolina, to stay with her beloved, kindly Uncle Earl, who calls her Carrot and owns the Glory to God Museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities and Taxidermy. The museum is chock full of taxidermic animals (and more fantastical creatures) and an assortment of other strange and wondrous items, including a grizzled tabby cat named Beau, who keeps the mice from ravaging the exhibits. It doesn’t take long for Kara to settle in, and she earns her keep by cataloging the museum’s collection. After hours, she enjoys hanging out with the gregarious (and often top-hatted) Simon, who works at the Black Hen coffee shop next door and regales Kara with outrageous stories from his Florida childhood. When Earl is hospitalized for knee surgery, Kara happily takes over the day-to-day work at the museum and enlists Simon’s help in patching a significant hole in the building’s drywall. Curiosity gets the best of Kara and Simon when they discover a dark corridor behind the hole, which leads to a door to an otherworldly place where willows whisper with the promise of horrors that soon threaten to spill out into Kara’s world. Luckily, Kara has Simon and maybe even a bit of help from some of the museum’s inhabitants. There are no cheap scares here, and while a few are Lovecraft-ian in flavor, they’re entirely of the author’s wonderfully twisted and endlessly fertile imagination, and readers will have no trouble rooting for the instantly likable Kara, who narrates, and the delightfully offbeat Simon.

The perfect tale for fans of horror with heart.