House of Hollow

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland follows the Hollow sisters, who vanished as children and returned changed - with black eyes, white hair, and strange abilities. When the eldest disappears again, Iris must uncover the dark truth about what happened to them.

House of Hollow is Krystal Sutherland's 2021 gothic fantasy that marks her darkest, most atmospheric work, blending contemporary urban fantasy with fairy tale horror to create something entirely original. Following the three Hollow sisters - Grey, Vivi, and Iris - who mysteriously disappeared as children and returned a month later profoundly changed, the novel explores trauma, sisterhood, beauty's sinister cost, and the question of what happened during that missing month. With prose that's both lyrical and unsettling, Sutherland crafts a story that feels like a dark fairy tale set in contemporary London, proving YA can embrace genuine horror whilst maintaining emotional depth.

The novel opens with seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow receiving disturbing news: her eldest sister Grey, now a famous fashion designer, has vanished. This wouldn't be remarkable except for the Hollow sisters' history. Ten years ago, Grey (then twelve), Vivi (ten), and Iris (seven) disappeared from a busy Edinburgh street. A month later, they were found on the same street with no memory of where they'd been, but profoundly changed. Their eyes turned black as beetles. Their hair turned white as bone. They began emitting an intoxicating scent - like roses, or honey, or whatever the person smelling them most desires. And strangest of all, they gained an inexplicable ability to influence people, to make others do what they want.

The changes made the Hollow sisters simultaneously beautiful and unsettling. Grey leveraged her otherworldly appearance into fashion industry fame, creating designs as strange and compelling as she is. Vivi became a successful musician. Iris, the youngest and most unsettled by their shared mystery, has spent a decade trying to be normal whilst watching her sisters embrace their strangeness.

When Grey disappears, leaving behind only cryptic clues and a trail of bizarre occurrences - dead crows appearing, reality seeming to warp - Iris must confront the questions she's been avoiding: What happened during that missing month? Where did they go? What are they becoming?

Sutherland employs first-person narration from Iris's perspective, creating intimate access to her confusion, fear, and growing realization that the truth might be far more disturbing than not knowing. The prose is Sutherland's most atmospheric, creating a London that feels simultaneously real and dreamlike, where fairy tale horror bleeds into contemporary reality.

The investigation forces Iris to examine her relationship with her sisters. Grey is distant, famous, treating her otherworldliness as asset rather than curse. Vivi is wild, reckless, leaning into the strange. Iris has been the normal one, the one trying to maintain humanity whilst her sisters drift further into whatever they're becoming. Their dynamic - loving yet fractured, protective yet secretive - drives the emotional core whilst the mystery propels the plot.

Supporting characters include Tyler Yang, Iris's best friend who gets drawn into the investigation; Gabe Dorian, Grey's boyfriend whose connection to the sisters' disappearance slowly emerges; and various figures from Grey's fashion world whose obsession with her beauty reveals darker undertones about consumption, desire, and the price of being wanted.

The mystery itself unfolds through clues Grey left behind - photographs, locations, designs that seem to encode memories she can't or won't speak. Sutherland builds atmosphere through accumulation: the dead crows, the scent that intensifies when the sisters are together, the way reality seems to bend around them, and the growing evidence that whatever took them ten years ago isn't finished.

The fairy tale elements are distinctly dark - more Brothers Grimm than Disney. References to changelings, to the Otherworld, to beings that steal children and return them changed, permeate the mystery. Sutherland never fully explains the supernatural mechanics, maintaining ambiguity that makes the horror more unsettling. Is what happened to them mythological, scientific, or something else entirely?

The novel explores beauty as both gift and curse. The Hollow sisters are extraordinarily beautiful, but their beauty is wrong somehow - too perfect, too compelling, inspiring obsession rather than mere attraction. Sutherland examines how beauty commodifies women, how fame consumes, and whether the sisters are predators or prey.

Themes of trauma and repressed memory, sisterhood and secrets, beauty as curse, what we inherit versus what's done to us, fairy tale horror in contemporary world, and whether some truths are better left buried run throughout.

The ending - which won't be spoiled - delivers both answers and new questions, addressing the central mystery whilst maintaining the novel's eerie, unsettled atmosphere.