The Hollow Places

In The Hollow Places, the stability of reality is depicted as a fragile construct, easily punctured by forces that operate beyond human comprehension. In this plane of existence, the novel suggests that individual sanity is not a measure of objective truth but a consensus based on limited perception. The fact that this consensus shatters when confronted with the truly alien reveals the thinness of the barrier between what is known and unknown.

The narrative first illustrates this fragility through the physical laws of the world breaking down. When a hole appears in the museum wall, Kara and Simon discover that from the museum side it is drywall, but from the corridor side it is six inches of solid concrete. Faced with this impossibility, their immediate reaction is to rationalize it with familiar explanations like “moonshining tunnels” (39) or hallucinations. However, the tangible proof of a chunk of concrete that was once drywall forces them to abandon their conventional understanding of physics. This literal hole in the wall is a hole in their reality, a physical violation of natural law that demonstrates how easily the world’s seemingly solid rules can be broken.