Hollow

Don’t Let the Forest In meets The Whispering Dark in a queer YA cult horror following a recently diagnosed autistic teen who becomes enmeshed in a community of outcasts harboring sinister secrets.

＂One of the best horror novels of the year, full stop. Haunting, heartfelt, and downright creepy.＂ --Kamilah Cole, bestselling author of So Let Them Burn

After a meltdown in her school cafeteria prompts an unwanted autism diagnosis, Cassie Davis moves back to her hometown in upstate New York, where her mom hopes the familiarity will allow Cassie to feel normal again. Cassie’s never truly felt normal anywhere, but she does crave the ease she used to have with her old friends.

Problem is that her friends aren’t so eager to welcome her back into the fold. They extend an olive branch by inviting her on their backpacking trip to Hollow Ridge, in the upper reaches of the Adirondacks. But when a fight breaks out their first night, Cassie wakes to a barren campsite--her friends all gone.

With severe weather approaching and nearing sensory overload, Cassie is saved by a boy named Kaleb, who whisks her away to a compound of artists and outcasts he calls the Roost. As Kaleb tends to her injuries, Cassie begins to feel--for the first time in her life--that she can truly be herself. But as the days pass, strange happenings around the Roost make Cassie question her instincts. Noises in the trees grow louder, begging the question: Are the dangers in the forest, on the trail, or in the Roost itself?

In a world where autistic characters rarely get to be the hero of their own stories, Cassie Davis’s one-step-back, two-steps-forward journey to unmasking makes Hollow as much a love letter to neurodiversity as it is a haunting tale you’ll want to read with the lights on.

Read if You Love:

• Don’t Go in the Woods
• Deadly Road Trips
• CottageGORE
• Malevolent Masks
• Cults
• Nerd-core
• Wound-tending
• First Love

Taylor Grothe is a neurodivergent (ASD) NB horror writer and an Arthuriana and Icelandic Saga scholar with a degree from Duke University. They hold an MFA in Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Their work has appeared in Haven Speculative, Shortwave Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, Parents, Verywell Family, Brevity’s writing craft blog, and an anthology published by Bag of Bones Press. Taylor is the 2023-2024 coordinator and founder of Round Table Mentor, an Author Mentor Match adult mentor in 2022, and the former graduate Assistant Managing Editor of Brevity Magazine. Taylor acted as a special editor for Brevity’s Transgender Experience issue in 2022. They live in Southwestern Connecticut with their spouse, two daughters, a Portuguese Water Dog, and two cats. Hollow is their debut novel.