The Hollow Congregation
THE HOLLOW CONGREGATION
When Aldous Crale inherits a lonely cottage on the northern moors from an uncle he never met, he arrives in the village of Thornhollow carrying little more than two bags and a persistent feeling that he has been expected.
The village appears ordinary. The people are friendly. The routines are familiar.
Too familiar.
Among his uncle's journals, Aldous discovers a secret that took eleven years to understand.
Most of the inhabitants of Thornhollow are not people in any complete sense.
They imitate humanity perfectly. They speak the correct words, dream the correct dreams, mourn with the correct grief. Yet beneath the performance there is nothing. They are expressions of an ancient pattern embedded deep beneath the moorland. A geometry older than history itself. A living structure that has spent eleven thousand years wearing human faces.
As Aldous joins the handful of genuine souls who have always known the truth, the village begins to unravel.
People pause in the middle of conversations and fail to resume. Familiar faces become uncertain around the edges. Entire lives seem to flicker in and out of existence.
The performance is breaking down.
The geometry is completing itself.
For millennia, Thornhollow has existed as a manifestation of something vast and incomprehensible beneath the earth. Now the village is returning to its source. The witnesses have been gathered for a final purpose: to observe the dissolution and record what remains when the masks fall away.
A haunting work of experimental folk horror set among the windswept moors of northern England, The Hollow Congregation moves from richly atmospheric Gothic prose into stark E-Prime precision as reality fractures around its characters.
It is a novel about presence and imitation. About memory and performance. About the difference between a lake and a mirror.
And about the unsettling possibility that some faces may contain no one at all.
By Mark Gordon Brown.
For readers who enjoy literary horror, metaphysical fiction, uncanny landscapes, and stories that linger long after the final page.
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