Hollow by Taylor Grothe is a book with a lot of potential. The main character, Cassie, has recently moved back to her home town and reconnected with her childhood best friends—but the past few years have been tough for all of them, and they just don’t fit the way they used to. When they go on a long hike together to try and reconnect, a major storm separates them, and Cassie finds herself in a sinisterly sweet, cultish community called the Roost.
I picked this one for a couple of reasons. I love a queer, autistic main character; I’m fascinated by cults. On the first point, the book lands. Cassie’s experience of autism, while different from my own, was clearly portrayed, and the book is at its strongest when it focuses on Cassie’s mom and her inability to understand Cassie. The frustration feels real. Cassie doesn’t seem to particularly care for her mother, but as a former disaffected teen myself, I understand that. The emotional separation was also necessary for the storyline: Cassie’s main concern at the Roost is her friends, and the intended “stay or go” conflict would have been flattened if she had a more loving relationship with her parent.
The idea was strong. I saw the bones of a really good story here. I like the idea of exploring autistic masking and using a character’s unmasking as central to their strength. The execution was poor, though. Cassie isn’t masking at this point, she’s traumatized and passive, and there is a difference.
That’s it on the positives from me. It was just a bad fit: wrong book for the reader. I like horror in general; I don’t like slow, atmospheric horror. I like plot-driven stories, I like character-driven stories, but I do not like predominantly introspective stories. Perhaps my most hated trope is the third-act breakup, which often feels forced, and this book is 75% “third act break-up” to the point I had secondhand embarrassment along with my boredom and frustration. Take my opinions with a grain of salt. If you like slow, atmospheric, introspective stories about people communicating poorly, it could be a perfect fit for you.
Spoiler warning here, readers. To explain my frustrations with the book overall, I need to explain some plot twists from later on.
This book needed an editor. The audiobook is 11.25 hours, and I was surprised to learn the text is only 350 pages. It feels a lot longer. Very little happens and the story just meanders. It was over-written and repetitive, and frankly, not always correct. One thing that stood out to me was a reference to Cassie lying prone on her back. That is not possible. “Prone” means to be lying on one’s front; “supine” means to be lying on one’s back. These are things an editor should have caught.
The cult falls flat for me. Here’s the thing about cults: people join for a reason. People stay for a reason. The people in this cult are literal puppets, but also somehow were humans who were bound up to an old tree in the forest—it’s not super clearly explained, but I think the idea is that each puppet needs some sort of human essence to seem alive. At the same time, they’re all controlled by the leader, so the human essence is sort of a non-issue. It’s confusing. It also negates the “cult” aspect of the story. The enemy is not the cult, the enemy is toxic masculinity. That’s not inherently problematic, just disappointing to me personally.
Much of the conflict throughout the book amounts to frustration. Cassie’s friends are just mad at her. As an autistic person myself, I understand, I have been there, I get that people just react. Been there, lived that. My issue with it is that people who react that way to autistic folks rarely become our best friends, so why were these girls ever Cassie’s best friends? She moved away and they fell out of touch, but a middle schooler doesn’t determine when and where they move to, and people fall out of touch often with distance between them. It felt strange that they blamed her so much for that. Again, this may be a personal issue. I don’t like books that are about people who can’t stand each other being forced to work together until they kiss. Since that’s basically this entire story, I was deeply frustrated.
2026 is not off to a strong reading start for me. I’ve read six books as of this writing and the only one I enjoyed was a reread. But it’s only been a few weeks. I hope next month I can share with you about a book I did enjoy! I haven’t read it yet, but I trust that it’s out there.
Content warnings: ableism, bullying, body horror
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