This is very readable and I’m glad I picked it up randomly at Barnes & Noble, but it didn’t live up to my hopes. I enjoyed Paladin’s Grace so much that I figured I’d see how Kingfisher did at horror. The Hollow Places follows Kara as she tries to recover from her recent divorce. She comes back to her small hometown to live with her uncle, who runs the Wonder Museum, full of taxidermy, Bigfoot memorabilia, and a picture of the Pope made of sunflower seeds. When her uncle has to get a knee replacement, she takes over running the museum for a few weeks. Everything is going smoothly until she and her friend discover a hole in the wall that leads to another world, which is seemingly empty…until it isn’t.
Again, this was a super readable book and I will keep picking up books by this author. I felt like this one was lighter and I never got really scared or worried about the main characters. The body horror descriptions were effective, but the humorous tone that the narrator has never seems to really leave, and so I was never really fully engaged with the horror. I felt removed from worrying that there were going to be terrible consequences. It reminded me a lot of some Stephen King stories (The Langoliers, From a Buick Eight, the end of Revival), which wasn’t a bad thing as I really enjoy stories that explore cosmic horror and being stuck between worlds with an unknowable horror. But it didn’t feel the most original and I spent chunks thinking that I should re-read From a Buick Eight. Serviceable and good train reading, but not a keeper.