House of Hollow

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-20

Chapter 21-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 17 Summary

With broken ribs, Iris hobbles to Agnes, whose body is bent and broken, “flowers teeming from her eye sockets, vines growing from her mouth, lichen covering her” in death (205). Tyler is battered and cries with Iris when she admits she lost Grey and Vivi. They cremate Agnes’s tree, like one would a body. Tyler encourages Iris to find the Halfway, since she’s been there before (at age seven), but she doesn’t think she’s a planner or leader like Grey. She considers dying as a method of transportation, so Tyler could drown her in a tub and then revive her. He denies her idea, so they strategize. Grey never talked to Tyler about her past in depth, but Iris suddenly realizes they can return to the beginning.

The door from which the Hollow girls originally vanished is close by, so Iris and Tyler gather supplies and walk there. Iris recognizes the street, but her memories are fleeting. She and Tyler struggle to find the door, until the latter researches online threads about the sisters’ mystery, some of which discuss freestanding doors leading to new places. However, the door in question is gone, as the building was repaired.

Iris uses her powers for the first time on a nearby homeowner, sticking her finger in her mouth and asking questions about the past. The woman eventually tells her about Agnes’s disappearance, in a nearby church. Iris and Tyler walk to the ruined church, where an old, freestanding door remains. They wait until sunset (a liminal time) and step through the threshold.

Chapter 18 Summary

Iris and Tyler enter the cold land of the dead, the air tainted with smoke, wild animals, and rot. Nausea hits the pair, causing them to vomit. They slowly acclimate to the bizarre, dying forest, everything “decomposing and misshapen, stuck in perpetual state of decay” (233). The sky is set at dusk. Iris and Tyler hear low wailing as they rise from the ruins of the church door’s portal. The former wonders what happened to her and her sisters here, and why they stayed so long (a month).

Many crumbling Halfway men and women stumble toward the door that Iris and Tyler just used. Iris thinks they’re like ghosts, and they barely register her and Tyler. Tyler asks if his deceased sister Rosie might be present, but Iris doesn’t hope for such a fate—though she’d want to see her lost sisters again. Iris feels a pinch of familiarity in this unwelcoming land, a chance for answers.

Iris and Tyler search miles of the Halfway, passing multiple doors held up by nothing and countless lost souls trapped by longing. Iris suddenly notices a red-and-black tartan fabric tied to a tree, the fabric of the coat she wore when she went missing. She and Tyler follow the coat pieces, and the former falls into a ditch of fetid water. The pair wade through the swamp of dead, into deep fog and past broken houses, and come upon a dark-haired child sitting on a mud island—Rosie. Tyler falls before his sister.

Chapter 19 Summary

Tyler scoops up Rosie and refuses to let her go, though Iris gently tells him that she died and can’t come back. Distraught, he refuses to let Rosie stay in the land of the dead. Iris comments that it’s odd that a child could have “unfinished business” keeping her there (233).

As the three continue through fog, a dilapidated house overrun with flowers appears, jogging Iris’s memory. It’s a house that the Hollow girls spent time in, the one Grey sketched. Iris investigates alone, finding faded blood spots that lead to a trap-door cellar. She uses Grey’s knife to lift the boards, brushing something furry. She’s terrified at first, then pulls out three coats soaked in dried blood, the exact coats her sisters wore when they vanished 10 years ago. Iris suddenly recalls Grey with a bloody knife, stitching a wound on her throat, and holding her sisters’ hands as they traveled through a door; Grey told her and Vivi to forget everything.

Tyler calls from outside, pushing overgrown greenery away from grave markers. Iris cries as she sees the first name: Grey. Then, Vivi beneath it. Iris sobs that they’re too late, but Tyler states the graves are old, so their timeline doesn’t make sense. Finally, Iris’s name is revealed on the stone. Overwhelmed, Iris tries to dig up the bodies, needing to know who they are. Tyler calms her, convincing her to rest.

Chapter 20 Summary

Iris and Tyler sleep in the old house, and the former dreams of her father, Gabe, hovering over her at night. Tears streamed down his face, his expression growing darker as Iris panicked in her bed. Now, she awakens to the bull-man, feeling a “flicker of recognition at the rate and hatred radiating from him” (240). The man overpowers her and drags her by her hair, as Tyler grabs a gun and races after them. Tyler shoots multiple times to save Iris, finally shattering the man’s bull skull mask, revealing his face. Deterred, the wounded man releases Iris and melts into the mist.

Iris and Tyler huddle together, with the former repeating that she saw the bull-man’s face and now knows who he is. A shadow stalks them, despite Tyler screaming at it to leave them alone. The bull-man, the shadow, is Gabe Hollow, Iris’s father. Gabe’s skin reveals stripped bone, and his jaw is broken from Tyler’s shot. As Gabe closes in, Rosie blocks his path, screaming like an animal. Gabe says he has Grey and Vivi, then retreats.

Iris rushes back to the graves at the house. Tyler shouts, “Your dead father has been trying to kill you! Your dead father kidnapped your sisters!,” not understanding Iris’s motive (243). Iris pleads with him to help her, as her ribs are broken, and they dig up the buried bodies—those of three girls, the real Hollow sisters, with matching, heart-shaped golden lockets. Tyler questions the identities of the corpses, but Iris says they prove she’s not Iris Hollow.

Chapters 17-20 Analysis

Iris’s character transforms when she is left behind with Tyler. Separated from her sisters after they’re kidnapped by the bull-man, she’s given room to grow into her own identity by the novel’s conclusion. While part of a trio, she doesn’t see herself as separate from her sisters. But when she’s left alone, Iris must rise to the occasion and rely on her courage, wits, and powers to find Grey and Vivi in the Halfway. Fueled by Tyler’s encouragement, Iris first suggests he drown and revive her to enter the liminal Halfway—a bold move she would have never suggested before. However, Tyler can’t drown her, especially given his sister Rosie died drowning, and Iris backs out anyway, showing her old sense of caution.

In her next step toward self-actualization, Iris learns to embrace her own intoxication—but doesn’t use it out of cruelty like Grey. Iris follows her instincts to where she and her sisters originally went missing and uses her power on a bystander: “The other two times I had compelled people, I had been vulnerable and unsure, and my attackers had fed on that. Now, this time, I was the one who would feast” (217). Assertive, Iris pushes the woman to tell her about her sisters and any nearby doors. Upon noting the woman’s confusion, Iris feels sympathy, as she’s acquainted with the feeling of “knowing you had memories about something but were unable to access them”—reinforcing the theme of Memory and Letting Go (219).

The morbid worldbuilding of the Halfway reinforces the story as a dark fairy tale itself. Sutherland’s attention to sensory details enriches her world and allows readers to easily imagine the unnatural Halfway. Again, she relies on scents to describe the city’s grass, sea, and stone being “usurped by smoke and wild animal and rot” and a cold chill (221). She also describes vivid sights, including the forest being “thick but decomposing and misshapen, stuck in a perpetual state of decay,” a sky of “gunmetal light” where the sun never set or rose, and “shadows stretched and sunken, full of twilight” (223). Iris finds the decaying woods angry and unwelcoming, ascribing the sound of wailing to the trees. The Halfway’s horrors also make it a Gothic setting, a place of death and entrapment.

In a significant reveal (second only to Grey confessing to killing the original Hollow girls), Iris realizes she and her sisters aren’t human. She’s not Iris Hollow. The bull-man, Grey’s runes, Vivi’s carrion flowers, Iris’s ants, the sisters’ intoxication powers, and countless lines about skin and changelings have all led to this reveal. Only by braving the grotesque place of her past could Iris find answers.