The Hollow
Ellie Frites is twenty-four, single, and going nowhere. She spends her days rotting in a cubicle and her nights drinking herself into an emotional stupor. One day, Ellie has a jarring hallucination: an old classmate stands beaten and bloodied in the woods of their hometown. The visions persist, growing more intricate and detailed, yanking Ellie from her humdrum present and back to the unforgiving halls of sixth grade. As she digs deeper into what happened that day in the woods, she finds there is someone intent on keeping the truth buried. And soon her present-day life-and the lives of her loved ones-are in serious peril.
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n.b.: I attended K–12 with Nicole and I fav all of her photos of her dog on Instagram.
I had a blast reading this. I think this is the first time I've read a thriller, and I was pulled in completely. ‘The Hollow' is relentless, tense, and inventive.
‘The Hollow' succeeds as a thriller: the mystery is woven well, the reveals are surprising, and the climax is white-knuckling. The writing is claustrophobic and manic, centering the narrator's perspective in a way that heightens the tension. Limited to her scattered, anxious thoughts and memories and the trouble of working through them, the story is always on edge. The red herrings are slick and the time-jumps (enabled by the clever structural device of regular therapy appointments) are great cliffhangers.
The book also succeeds as a fearless document of the endless and horrifying ways that women are oppressed and abused by patriarchy and rape culture and how that trauma, large and small, affects them over the course of their lives. Beyond the obvious evil of the book's villain, we see rampant victim-blaming and dismissal of women's voices; we see Ellie's boss sexually harassing her and retaining a position for which he's completely unfit; we see Maureen's social work leave her exhausted, underpaid, and in an impossible bind. ‘The Hollow' demonstrates over and over again the systematic inequality and hardship faced by women, the poor, and those suffering from drug addiction by centering its women characters and weaving their stories into the narrative.
This is great work, and I can't wait for Nicole's next book.