House of Hollow

House of Hollow Plot Summary

Introduction

The first time Iris Hollow realized she was strange, she was ten years old, lying frozen in bed as a woman in white slipped through her window and cut off a lock of her hair with sewing scissors. The intruder pressed the curl to her nose, inhaled deeply, then swallowed it whole before moving toward her sisters' rooms. What followed was violence and blood, until Grey—beautiful, terrifying Grey—subdued the woman with nothing more than a kiss that left the air smelling of honey and rot. This was the world the Hollow sisters inhabited: a place where their extraordinary beauty drew both worship and horror, where their very presence seemed to warp reality around them. Iris, with her milk-white hair and black eyes, had spent years trying to understand what made her family different. She knew they were famous for vanishing as children from a street in Edinburgh on New Year's Eve, only to return a month later with no memory of where they'd been. She knew their father had killed himself, convinced his daughters were impostors. She knew people whispered about them, called them witches, crossed themselves when the sisters passed. What Iris didn't know—what none of them remembered—was the truth of what had happened in that missing month. A truth so terrible it had been buried beneath layers of false memory and wishful thinking. Now, as Grey vanishes once again, Iris and her middle sister Vivi must follow a trail of bread crumbs that leads back to that first disappearance, to a place between life and death where flowers grow from corpses and doors lead to worlds that shouldn't exist.

Chapter 1: The Vanishing: Grey Hollow Disappears

The morning began with Grey's face staring up from a Vogue magazine on the hall floor, ethereal and haunting in the pale London light. Iris had grown accustomed to seeing her eldest sister everywhere—on billboards, in shop windows, gracing the covers of fashion magazines with her otherworldly beauty. Grey Hollow, supermodel and fashion designer, had conquered the world with her mysterious allure and her House of Hollow creations that whispered secrets through hidden messages sewn into silk. But this morning felt different. When Vivi called from Budapest, her voice carrying news of an impromptu London gig, Iris sensed the strangeness creeping back into their carefully ordered lives. It had been four years since Grey left home in fury, since their father's suicide, since the family fractured beyond repair. Now nineteen-year-old Vivi, tattooed and pierced like a punk rock goddess, was pulling seventeen-year-old Iris away from her books and her plans for Oxford, back into the orbit of their magnetic, dangerous sister. The evening should have been simple—watch Vivi's band play at Camden's Jazz Café, catch up with Grey who was flying in from Paris. Instead, it became the night everything unraveled. Grey never showed. During the performance, Vivi froze on stage, staring at something in the crowd that left her gasping and afraid. Later, at Grey's pristine apartment overlooking the Thames, they found only emptiness and the uncomfortable feeling that this sterile space had never truly belonged to their wild, chaotic sister. It was Tyler Yang, Grey's boyfriend and fellow supermodel, who provided the first real clue. Bitter from their recent breakup, he spoke of Grey's disappearances, her secretive nature, the occult artifacts he'd glimpsed in her hidden apartment. When pressed about their relationship's end, he revealed the truth that would set everything in motion: he'd seen a man leaving Grey's flat. A strange man who hadn't looked entirely human, whose presence had filled Tyler with inexplicable dread. The police, when they finally took the sisters' concerns seriously, seemed almost bored by another missing person case. But Iris felt it in her bones—this wasn't a simple disappearance. This was the beginning of something that would force them all to confront the darkness they'd been running from since childhood.

Chapter 2: Carrion Flowers: Following the Bread Crumbs

Grey's second apartment told a different story entirely. Hidden in Shoreditch under their grandmother's name, it was everything the first wasn't—dark, mystical, alive with secrets. Candles and crystals clustered on every surface, alongside terrariums of carnivorous plants and jars containing preserved creatures suspended in formaldehyde. The walls were covered in Grey's sketches of impossible beings and ruined doorways, while dried bouquets hung from the ceiling like offerings in some pagan temple. Then they found the body. It tumbled from the ceiling access panel in a grotesque cascade of decay, a young man whose throat had been slashed, whose flesh was now a garden for waxy white flowers that sprouted from his eyes, his mouth, the wound at his neck. The carrion blooms pulsed with alien life, their roots threading through dead tissue like crimson thread through silk. Before they could fully process this horror, the apartment filled with smoke and flame. The man in the bull skull had returned—tall, shirtless, wearing the bleached bone mask of some ancient beast. He moved with predatory grace as he piled Grey's possessions onto the corpse and set it all ablaze, destroying evidence of whatever dark ritual had taken place in this room. Iris and Vivi barely escaped through the window, clutching what artifacts they could save from the flames. As they ran through London's wet streets, Iris felt the weight of her sister's journal in her hands, filled with newspaper clippings about missing persons and sketches of doorways that shouldn't exist. Each page revealed more of Grey's obsession with disappearances, with the liminal spaces between worlds where people vanished without explanation. The man with the bull skull wasn't finished with them. He appeared at Vivi's concert, sending her into a panic attack that left her shaking and afraid. He stalked them through their everyday lives, a creature of rot and shadow who seemed to know exactly where they would be. Most terrifying of all, Iris began to understand that this wasn't random—this thing had been hunting the Hollow sisters for years, waiting for the right moment to reclaim what it believed belonged to it. In the wreckage of Grey's burned apartment, they discovered something impossible. The fire had revealed a hidden doorway behind the bookshelf, its frame thick with the same white flowers that had consumed the dead man. When Iris pressed her palm against the ancient wood, she felt Grey's heartbeat pulsing weak but steady on the other side, as if her sister was trapped just beyond reach in some parallel dimension.

Chapter 3: Doorways Between Worlds: The Hunt for Truth

The discovery of Yulia Vasylyk changed everything. This former roommate of Grey's had also vanished mysteriously, only to return a week later with no memory of where she'd been. Like the Hollow sisters, she'd been found naked and disoriented, marked with bloody runes that defied explanation. Unlike them, she remembered enough to be afraid. At the warehouse photo shoot in Spitalfields, Yulia wielded scissors like weapons, keeping the sisters at bay as she revealed fragments of the truth. Grey had been different even as a teenager—secretive, manipulative, capable of making people do things against their will with nothing more than a kiss or a touch. The apartment they'd shared in Hackney had become a place of nightmares after Grey left, impossible to rent or sell because something malevolent lingered in its walls. When they found the apartment, the stench of decay led them to a horror hidden behind fresh wallpaper. The wall itself was rotting from within, riddled with the same carrion flowers that seemed to follow in the sisters' wake. These weren't ordinary blooms but pyrophytes—plants that thrived in fire and death, hybrids that shouldn't exist in nature. Grey's journal provided more pieces of the puzzle. Each sketch showed a different doorway in a different city, all of them ruins that had once led somewhere but now led somewhere else. She'd been traveling the world, mapping these impossible portals, searching for something she'd lost or trying to understand something she'd found. The trail led them back to Edinburgh, to the very street where they'd vanished as children. Here, in the Old Town's narrow lanes, stood the house rebuilt over the ruins where three little girls had last been seen. The current resident, compelled by Iris's desperate touch, spoke of her grandmother's warnings about Saint Anthony's Chapel, about doors that led to places children shouldn't go. As dawn approached, Iris and Tyler Yang—who had joined their hunt out of love for Grey—stood before the ruined chapel on Holyrood Park. The doorway was ancient stone, freestanding like a theatrical prop against the Scottish sky. According to legend, this was where Agnes Young had vanished decades ago, where others had been lost to whatever lay beyond the threshold between worlds. The moment of sunrise brought with it the scent of smoke and the whisper of voices from somewhere far away. When they stepped through the doorway together, the world dissolved around them like watercolors in rain.

Chapter 4: The Halfway: A Liminal Realm of the Dead

They fell from dawn to dusk, from the living world into something that existed in the spaces between life and death. The Halfway stretched before them like a fever dream—a dying forest where the sky hung perpetually at twilight and the trees rotted while still standing. Everything here was caught in a state of eternal decay, beautiful and terrible in equal measure. The dead wandered this realm like living statues, their bodies slowly transforming into wood and stone as they waited by ruined doorways for a chance to return home. Some had been here so long they'd become part of the landscape itself, their forms twisted into grotesque art by time and longing. Others were recent arrivals, still recognizably human but marked by the black eyes and lichen-covered skin that marked the inhabitants of this cursed place. Agnes Young, the child who'd vanished from Edinburgh decades ago, had become the guardian of this particular crossing point. Ancient beyond her apparent years, she tended to Grey with potions that expelled the infected flowers growing inside her body. The Halfway got into everything, she explained—it was a parasite that consumed whatever it touched, turning living tissue into gardens of decay. Following the red tartan bread crumbs they'd left as children, Iris and Tyler made their way deeper into the marshlands where bodies floated like lily pads on dark water. The journey led them to a ruined house on a muddy island, the same structure Grey had sketched obsessively in her journal. Here, buried in a shallow grave, they found the truth that shattered everything Iris thought she knew about herself. The bodies in the grave wore gold lockets with familiar names: Grey, Vivi, Iris. These were the real Hollow sisters, the children who'd fallen through the doorway on New Year's Eve and never made it home. Their skin had been carefully removed, their lives stolen by creatures desperate enough to murder for a chance at rebirth. When Tyler read the names aloud, Iris felt her world collapse into darkness. She was not Iris Hollow. She was something else entirely, something that had crawled inside a dead girl's skin and worn it home to unsuspecting parents. The revelation hit like a physical blow, leaving her gasping in the fetid air of the Halfway as everything she'd believed about herself crumbled to ash. The man in the bull skull wasn't a monster hunting them—he was their victim's father, driven to madness by grief and the knowledge that imposters had taken his daughters' place in his home and heart.

Chapter 5: Skin Deep: The Revelation of Identity

Gabriel Hollow had died by suicide, compelled by the creature wearing his eldest daughter's face. But death had not freed him from his rage and sorrow. In the Halfway, he'd found the bodies of his real children and sworn an oath of vengeance against the things that had stolen their lives and destroyed his family. He'd taken Tyler's skin the same way the sisters had taken their victims', wearing the young man's face like a mask while his true nature writhed beneath. The deception was perfect except for the eyes—those remained black as pitch, windows into a soul consumed by righteous fury. The confrontation by the funeral pyre was inevitable. Grey and Vivi hung bound and unconscious, surrounded by kindling that would reduce their stolen bodies to ash. A third stake waited empty for Iris, who arrived too late to prevent the trap but perhaps just in time to spring one of her own. The man wearing Tyler's face was once Gabriel Hollow, gentle craftsman and loving father. But grief had twisted him into something harder, more ruthless than his daughters' killers. He wanted his real children to rest in peace and the imposters to burn for their crimes. Only Iris stood between him and that goal. The fight was brutal and desperate. Iris, weakened by broken ribs and days of travel through the realm of the dead, could barely stand against a creature driven by parental fury. But when she reached out and touched his cheek, calling him Papa with all the love a stolen daughter could muster, something in Gabriel broke. He couldn't kill her while she wore his baby girl's face, spoke with his child's voice. The moment of hesitation was enough for Iris to break free and reach the pyre. She cut her sisters loose just as the flames reached them, all three emerging from the inferno marked by burns but alive. Grey tried desperately to resurrect Tyler using the same dark magic that had once brought them home, but his soul had already moved on. Some violations of nature's laws could only be performed once, and Tyler Yang's death would be permanent. As they prepared to leave the Halfway behind forever, Iris caught a glimpse of him watching from the shadows—free at last, no longer trapped between worlds.

Chapter 6: Monstrous Reflections: Accepting What Lies Beneath

The return journey to the living world felt like drowning in reverse, fighting upward through layers of death and dream until they collapsed in the ruins of Grey's burned apartment. The carrion flowers had claimed every surface, turning the destruction into a grotesque garden that bloomed with alien beauty. Grey administered the same bitter potion Agnes had used, forcing her sisters to vomit up the infection that had taken root inside them during their stay in the Halfway. The expelled matter writhed with plant life and small creatures, evidence of how quickly that realm could claim and transform living tissue. As they recovered in the pre-dawn darkness, Grey finally told them the truth about what they were. She'd been the architect of their escape from the Halfway as children, the one who'd lured the real Hollow sisters through the doorway and murdered them for their skin. The process had been gruesome but necessary—the only way three dead children could return to the world of the living was by wearing the faces of the recently deceased. The revelation that they were monsters wearing human masks should have destroyed what remained of their sisterhood. Instead, it bound them closer together in shared guilt and understanding. They were cuckoos who'd pushed the real children from their nest, but they'd also lived as those children for a decade, loving their adoptive parents and building lives on a foundation of blood and lies. Cate Hollow, their mother, had known the truth for years but chosen to keep them anyway. Better to love the ghosts of her murdered daughters than to have no children at all. She'd thrown Grey out not from anger but from terror, finally understanding the full scope of what had been done to her family. Tyler Yang's funeral became a media spectacle orchestrated by Grey's supernatural charisma. She bent hundreds of mourners to her will, making them complicit in a lie that would rewrite history. The official story spoke of stalkers and kidnapping, of a heroic young man who died trying to save the woman he loved. Only Iris refused to be drawn back into Grey's web of influence and manipulation. She'd seen too much, understood too clearly what her eldest sister was capable of when crossed. Some bonds, even those forged in blood and dark magic, could be broken by conscious choice.

Summary

In the end, Iris chose to remain with the woman who'd raised her, the mother who'd loved her despite knowing she was a monster. Cate Hollow had lost three daughters to supernatural predators but gained three others in return—broken, dangerous creatures who needed guidance more than judgment. The love between them was built on shared trauma and mutual need, but it was love nonetheless. Grey returned to her glittering world of fashion and fame, using her powers to reshape reality around her preferred narrative. She would never face consequences for Tyler's death or the countless other lives she'd destroyed in service of her ambitions. Beauty and charisma were her shields against a world that couldn't quite bring itself to believe in monsters that looked like angels. The story closes with Iris and Vivi standing before another doorway in another ruin, prepared to venture once more into the Halfway. Tyler's soul might yet linger there, trapped between death and whatever comes after. If love could bind the dead to the world of the living, perhaps it could also set them free. The sisters who'd stolen their names and faces would risk everything to save the boy who'd died for their sins, even if it meant losing themselves in the process. Some debts can only be paid in darkness, in the spaces between worlds where flowers bloom from corpses and the dead dream of going home.

About Author

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Krystal Sutherland

Sutherland reframes the landscape of young adult fiction by integrating contemporary themes with elements of dark fantasy and gothic storytelling. Beginning her career with the novel "Our Chemical Hearts", she delved into the emotional complexity of young love and heartbreak. This work gained international acclaim, leading to a film adaptation by Amazon Studios. Her narrative technique, which combines relatable characters with intricate emotional plots, is further explored in "A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares", where she investigates fear and familial bonds. Meanwhile, these earlier works set the foundation for a thematic evolution in her subsequent novels.\n\nKrystal Sutherland’s literary journey transitions into exploring supernatural and gothic themes, as evidenced in her book "House of Hollow". This novel, which became a New York Times bestseller, signals a shift towards examining darker, more intricate narratives involving fantasy and magic. Her writing philosophy reflects a return to her early interests in thrillers, blending emotional depth with imaginative storytelling. Readers benefit from her ability to weave complex themes of identity and societal norms into gripping tales, which resonate with a global audience, evident from her work being published in over 20 countries. Sutherland's continued exploration of fantasy is seen in "The Invocations", marking her evolution in addressing topics of curses and patriarchy.\n\nBeyond her novels, Sutherland’s impact is recognized through various accolades, such as being named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list and having her works optioned for adaptations. Her bio reveals an author who has navigated different genres while maintaining an emotional core, offering both young and mature readers a blend of reality and fantasy that challenges and entertains.

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