Ronald Kelly, Hell Hollow (Cemetery Dance, 2009)
As a book, Hell Hollow missed its decade. As written, it would fit perfectly into the oft-discussed "horror glut" of the 1980s, a fast-paced sleigh ride of a town's dark deeds coming back to haunt it. Mix in a little coming-of-age by way of the charms of small town life, top it with a nod to Satan (who doesn't put in an appearance), and season it with some of the tone of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and you've got Hell Hollow.
The problem, or one of them, is that the town's dark deed is a pretty understandable one. When a traveling peddler poisons the town's babies with his miracle elixir, the menfolk take matters into their own hands. As far as rampaging mobs go, that's one of the more sympathetic ones out there, particularly since the peddler's motivations for doing his foul deed don't feel particularly strong.
Fast forward to the present day, and the last two survivors of that terrible night are old men, checker-playing fixtures in the small town of Harmony, Tennessee. They've buried the secret, and their own culpability in it -- their failure to warn the town after the peddler's elixir killed a beloved dog -- deep in the past, and don't think on it much any more. But when Harmony's picture-perfect Southern-ness gets a double shot of modernity, everything changes.
The first hit comes with the arrival of the grandson of one of the old men. City boy Keith Bishop is reflexively unlikable and aggressively bratty, and his grandfather Jasper's oft-repeated hopes for some bonding time seem doomed to failure. Naturally they argue almost from the get-go, but things settle down a bit when Keith starts hanging out with a few of the local kids. From there, it's a fairly smooth road to his appreciation of the simple life, and all that comes with it.
The second shock is more emphatic, as a serial rapist on the run stumbles into the titular hollow where the murdered peddler's wagon rots quietly away. Naturally, he drinks something he ought not to, and the dark spirit of the original villain returns to wreak more havoc in this new form.
What happens next is, for lack of a better word, disappointing. While the initial promise of the children's encounter with the villain holds promise -- he tempts them into dream worlds that quickly become deathtrap nightmares -- the means by which they are rescued is simply too easy and too unbelievable in context. When the resurrected monster starts cutting a bloody swath through town, the reaction is minimal. As for the conclusion, it's again too easy, leaving behind the question of "why," as the villain's own explanation is woefully unsatisfactory.
Kelly's short story collection, Midnight Grinding, has some superb work with mood and tone, but Hell Hollow is almost entirely plot-driven and as such, moves away from Kelly's strengths. The southern idyll that is Harmony gets painted in too-sweet hues, rendering it potentially hokey. There are sharp moments here, such as when Keith confronts his playmates with the moral equivalency of his shoplifting with their stealing of produce, but they're not carried through, and the book suffers for it. And underpinning it all is the potentially fatal premise, the notion that young Jasper allowed his baby sister to be fed the same elixir that killed his dog.
Ultimately, Hell Hollow feels like a missed opportunity. Kelly is certainly a writer to watch, but there's far more that rewards the watching in his short fiction, at least for now.
