Hollow by Taylor Grothe

Blurb:

Don’t Let the Forest In meets The Whispering Dark in a queer YA cult horror following a recently diagnosed autistic teen who becomes enmeshed in a community of outcasts harboring sinister secrets.

After a meltdown in her school cafeteria prompts an unwanted autism diagnosis, Cassie Davis moves back to her hometown in upstate New York, where her mom hopes the familiarity will allow Cassie to feel normal again. Cassie’s never truly felt normal anywhere, but she does crave the ease she used to have with her old friends.

Problem is that her friends aren’t so eager to welcome her back into the fold. They extend an olive branch by inviting her on their backpacking trip to Hollow Ridge, in the upper reaches of the Adirondacks. But when a fight breaks out their first night, Cassie wakes to a barren campsite—her friends all gone.

With severe weather approaching and nearing sensory overload, Cassie is saved by a boy named Kaleb, who whisks her away to a compound of artists and outcasts he calls the Roost. As Kaleb tends to her injuries, Cassie begins to feel—for the first time in her life—that she can truly be herself. But as the days pass, strange happenings around the Roost make Cassie question her instincts. Noises in the trees grow louder, begging the question: Are the dangers in the forest, on the trail, or in the Roost itself?

In a world where autistic characters rarely get to be the hero of their own stories, Cassie Davis’s one-step-back, two-steps-forward journey to unmasking makes Hollow as much a love letter to neurodiversity as it is a haunting tale you’ll want to read with the lights on.

Review:

After a meltdown at her previous, prestigious school in upstate New York results in the demolition of Cassie Davis’s life—her parents divorced, her trauma internalized, a forced move back home—she’d desperate to achieve the normalcy she’d abandoned when she and her parents had moved to New York years ago. Returning to the friends she once, and has ignored for years, Cassie tries to put back together the broken friendships she left behind.

When her friends declare their idea of going on a hiking trip into a pass notorious for causing disappearances of teens like them, Cassie decides to tag along. But the trip doesn’t go as intended when a drunken party turns into a drunken fight, and Cassie wakes up alone, abandoned on the forested cliffside where they were camping. She sets out to find her friends, only to discover one of them has come back for her. Before they can decide what to do next, a freak storm strikes the mountain, resulting in Cassie spraining her ankle and getting lost in the woods, separated from the only friend who came back for her. Found by a boy named Kaleb who promises to take care of her, she’s introduced to a community of people in the woods who keep her warm, safe, and fed. Except…everything isn’t right with this ragtag community, and as Cassie grows more comfortable, her mask slips, and she might just be trusting her true self with the wrong person.

I’ve followed Taylor Grothe’s publishing journey since before Hollow had a book deal, and it’s been on my TBR list for far too long. Hollow is a medicine I didn’t know I needed for an ailment I’ve too often tried to ignore. A haunting, bone-chilling, and nail-scraping read, Hollow is a book that is perfect to read while camping or trading spooky stories in the night. It gave me the impression of something I won’t stop thinking about for days (if not years) to come, with its deadbolt prose and phenomenal, raw characterization.

One of my absolute favorite things about this novel was the characterization of the main character: Cassie. As an Autistic individual myself, who also suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, this book was truly a calling card to experiences I didn’t realize were communal with another person. Grothe does an excellent job of putting together a narrative around Cassie and the issues Cassie faces.

One of the things Hollow brought to mind for me is the concept of “expecting pressure from expected expectations”. There’s a principle of invisible expectations that so many Autistic individuals experience, and I didn’t even think about it in depth until I read the pages of this phenomenal book. It can be so easy to assume there are expectations we need to meet, and therefore we limit ourselves, letting our anxiety and worry about not feeling correct or good dismantle our sense of selves.

I absolutely adored this book, and very strongly recommend it to readers looking for a fresh take on horror, especially one that centralizes marginalized communities and showcases why those communities (and individuals like Cassie!) are so incredibly important. With diabolical prose, knife-sharp stakes, and a main character who’s raw, vulnerable, and outraged…this is a horror book readers won’t be able to put down!