The Hollowing

Atmosphere is the story’s strongest suit, but I left feeling like the plot borrowed too many familiar beats from other small-town horrors. Clara’s grief is convincing, and the scene where she catalogs her mother’s life is painfully real, but the machine-as-plot-device felt like a shortcut. The rules remain fuzzy and several character motivations (beyond grief) aren’t fully explored — why does the town tolerate the centerhouse? What was Noah like before he disappeared beyond “small mischiefs”? I admire the prose and the tense, intimate mood, but the narrative didn’t push far enough into its own weirdness for me. Felt safe when it should have been ruthless.

I liked the idea but got frustrated. Small-town horror where everyone’s secrets are a little too neat for my taste. The centerhouse device is a cool image, but it starts to feel like the story expects you to accept its rules because it’s creepy, not because they make sense. Also — and this is petty maybe — Noah’s absence is used to drive Clara all over town, and the scenes of her bargaining could have been tightened; some pages drag while the interesting questions are only hinted at. That said, the writing has nice lines and the lemon oil detail hits hard. If you enjoy mood over explanations, go for it. If you need your metaphysics spelled out, you might be annoyed. Kinda 50/50 for me.

I wanted to like this more than I did. The premise — a machine that trades memories for parts of people — is intriguing, and the opening does a fine job of laying out Clara’s grief and the town’s rot. The problem for me is pacing and follow-through: the centerhouse and its commerce are introduced with great promise, but the mechanics never get enough focus. I kept waiting for a scene that explored the machine’s rules in depth or showed more of the town’s wider complicity; instead we get hints and ritualistic atmosphere, which is fine up to a point but feels evasive here. There are lovely touches (the lemon oil, the sagging porch), and the author handles grief well, but some moral beats feel undercooked. Why would certain memories be exchangeable for certain ‘pieces’? How did the town rationalize this system before Clara arrived? These gaps left me wanting more explanation rather than leaving me unsettled. A decent read with strong atmosphere, but it leans on mystery where clarity would have strengthened the emotional stakes.

The Hollowing is one of those rare stories that marries elegy and dread so seamlessly I found myself reading with a notebook beside me, wanting to capture lines. Clara’s grief is rendered with surgical attention — the way she files dates and pills, the measured description of her mother’s collapse — and that sobriety makes the surreal centerhouse all the more devastating. There are scenes here I’ll revisit: the bus letting Clara out where pavement becomes gravel (such a small image that says so much), the porch sagging like a tired body, the sudden absence of Noah in rooms that should be full of him. The machine in the centerhouse is a terrifying invention because it adheres to a logic you can almost understand: memories have currency; people can be reduced to the sum of traded parts. I loved how the story forces Clara (and the reader) into an accounting exercise of love and loss — how much of yourself are you willing to spend to buy someone back? The bargaining sequences are intimate and restrained rather than theatrical; you never get a full mechanical explanation, which I think is wise — mystery keeps the moral cost from being rationalized away. Stylistically, the prose is economical but evocative. The town’s small details are chosen with care and used to create a pervasive, melancholic claustrophobia. For readers who want horror that’s atmospheric, morally thorny, and quietly devastating rather than reliant on jump scares, The Hollowing delivers. It stayed with me long after I closed it.

Okay, so I didn’t expect to be emotionally blackmailed by a town and a vending-machine-for-souls, but here we are. The Hollowing does the small-town-gothic thing with real skill — the sagging porch and names of pills catalogued like receipts are classic, but the twist (that the centerhouse literally keeps people) is both gory and oddly tender. I laughed out loud at one moment — when Clara half-expects Noah to appear the way you hope your sibling will magically show up to bail you out — and then got chills when she walks into that lemon-oil-smelling house and finds everything staged. It’s sharp, darkly witty in places, and the bargaining scenes are deliciously awful. If you like horror unafraid to make you root for morally dubious choices, this one’s for you. Brilliantly creepy.

Short and aching. The opening — Clara arriving, the town’s quiet, the lemon-scented rooms — set the mood perfectly. The concept of a machine that trades memories for pieces of people is both chilling and oddly sad. I liked the restraint in the prose; nothing flashy, just enough to make the centerhouse feel terrible and inevitable. Felt like reading a slow-burning nightmare. 😊

Nicely constructed psychological horror that uses setting as a character. The author stages the town like a gallery of absence — the bakery awning, the hardware store parade of tools, the green with leaning benches — and then introduces the centerhouse as the dark nucleus where the town’s ethic of preservation is literalized by the memory-trading machine. I appreciated the moral clarity of the dilemma: Clara can reclaim a person only by surrendering parts of herself (memories, identity, whatever the machine demands). That raises interesting questions about what constitutes a person and what memory really is. The writing balances exposition and tension well — not overwritten, but never thin. Specific scenes that stood out: the kitchen collapse description (smallness of death) and the bargaining sequences in the centerhouse, where silence and ritual replace argument. Recommended for readers who like horror that thinks as much as it scares.

This story clung to me in the best way — quiet, precise, and quietly devastating. Clara’s return to town felt painfully real: the bus stop with its damp newspaper, the sagging porch, the lemon-oil smell in the house — those details anchored every weird turn that followed. I loved how grief is shown as an organizing force (Clara cataloguing dates and pills felt like something I’ve done myself), and the centerhouse’s machine — trading memories for pieces of people — is a brilliant, grotesque metaphor for what we do to hold on. There’s a moment I keep thinking about: Clara bargaining in a room full of preserved lives, counting what she’s willing to lose to get Noah back. It’s intimate and morally awful in a way that made me uncomfortable and excited at once. The prose is spare but richly atmospheric; the town’s decay and the machine’s cold commerce make a perfect pair. I finished feeling haunted and oddly grateful. A gorgeous, unnerving read.