Cosmic Roots in a Hungry Land | Unearthing The Hollow Kind with Andy Davidson
Interviews
By Joe Koch
Midway through Andy Davidson’s The Hollow Kind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I realize there’s no turning back. I’m an impatient reader, a lover of brevity, and yet this novel of generational trauma and vast manipulative evil has seduced me with the comforting familiarity of its musical Southern cadence. I can feel the mud of the Georgia clay sucking at my shoes. I need to go slow. It’s humid here, and an itchy seed that’s been planted in my imagination is sprouting, reaching, sending out roots that will only be satisfied with grasping the totality of the massive eldritch horror at the center of the book, the center of the land. I try to resist immersion, but the sonorous beauty draws me in deeper, deeper . . .
Look. Listen. Walk slowly with me through the vines and brush of this lush and precisely crafted novel as the creature comes near: “Lonnie drew closer and saw that the old man’s beard was not really hair but moss, and the old man’s eyes were not really eyes but wet river stones, and his skin was not skin but the light pulpy flesh of a longleaf pine, its bark skinned away. For the first time, Lonnie thought he might be dead.”
Be careful, fellow reader: he might be neither.
Joe Koch: Hello, Andy. I’m so grateful you agreed to chat with me about The Hollow Kind. Reading it was an immense pleasure. Before delving into the book, I like to ask a general question by way of introduction: Why horror?
Andy Davidson: Horror was my first love. When I was a kid, I read Stephen King’s IT, The Shining, and Night Shift back to back. Probably what I felt then and still feel is that intimate connection we all form with a good book, only intensified by fear. Plus: monsters are cool.
As to what made me want to writer horror fiction: I was ten when Mom put Dean Koontz’s Watchers in my hand. After I turned the last page of that book, I knew I wanted to tell stories, too—to create that sense of breathless, page-turning anticipation, to give other readers the chance to follow characters they root for and grow to love.
I also find horror . . . comforting. Most folks don’t like to think about it, but horror is with us, always. From the news headlines to that asymmetrical mole that pops up on your skin, we all feel things like fear, repulsion, dread, and despair. Sometimes, we look in the mirror, and we don’t even recognize the person looking back. That’s horror of the daily variety, wherein we’re reminded that, even as we try to be better, we’re all just shambling versions of some monster we don’t understand. Horror is a confrontational genre, but most often what we’re confronting is just ourselves.
JK: That description seems paradoxical, but I think I get what you mean. Horror fans really have an eye for facing up to the difficult parts of being human. Beyond its explorations of self, The Hollow Kind demonstrates a stunning sense of place. In your afterword, you discuss how exploring rural ruins in Georgia informed the novel’s setting. Tell me how the story of the Redfern family came to life through your field research. Which came first: the family or the place?
AD: Place always comes first for me. Around 2019, my wife and I were looking at land and houses for sale here in Georgia. We came across a couple of properties that were old and mysterious (and, unfortunately, out of our price range), and that was partly the seed of the idea—these forgotten, Gothic houses.
Also, I knew I wanted my next project to be authentic to this region, where I live, and I’d heard a few great stories from colleagues and friends about local land wars at the turn of the century. To the county south of us, in the late 1800s, longleaf pine forests as old as the Pleistocene were bought up for pennies on the dollar by a northern lumber company. They razed them. This set off a chain of explosive conflicts between the lumber barons from New England and these impoverished Southern families who had lost everything after the Civil War. So I started digging into that history, and out of my research came the idea for an outsider with dreams of empire. He marries into money and gets a thousand acres of longleaf pine as his wife’s dowry, then promptly exploits it for turpentine farming, which was big business in this region back then. Enter August Redfern.
It’s a familiar story, in a way. I’m thinking of Serena by Ron Rash, about logging in the Smoky Mountains. But I wanted to put my own horror spin on it. So I started thinking about the woods themselves, what mysteries they might contain, how those mysteries might change or shape a man’s fortunes or destroy him. That’s a thread in many folk horror narratives: the prior evil that exists on the land, disturbed or disrupted by an outsider.
Finally, and simply, my wife and I hike a lot. Georgia has incredible state parks. In fact, there’s one not too far from us that contains, all in a single hike, a hardwood forest, sand hills and turkey oaks, a few reseeded longleaf pines, wide-open wire grass meadows, and a cypress swamp, complete with alligators. Beauty and menace, all in one two-hour trek. That hike is, essentially, August Redfern’s back yard.
JK: It’s wonderful to learn more about the history of the area you call home and how you and your wife were even seeking a new home while the idea for the novel formed. It makes sense: family and the longing for a place to call home feel like the heart of the story. I love what you’ve done with the haunted house trope and how you’ve answered the question of why your characters don’t just leave. Talk to me about roots.
AD: Home and place are all about roots, right? People who come from small towns are inevitably drawn back home. I don’t know why, but it’s a truth. Sometimes these familial threads tether us to the places that have made us, nourished us, or should have nourished us but didn’t. Maybe they even ruined us. But, for whatever reason, those threads can’t be easily severed.
In The Hollow Kind, that’s where Nellie Gardner finds herself: coming back to a place where her family’s roots took more than they gave. But she’s been given a second chance; she has this new opportunity, in her grandfather’s old estate and farmhouse, to be her own person. To wrestle free from the iron grip of a bastard husband and raise her son in a place that’s fit for a boy to play. But this house, this land, they’ve never been fit for that. They’re dangerous.
Ownership—or the illusion of it—is a big theme in the book. Industrialists think they own the land, but they’re actually in thrall to it. Nellie brings Max to Redfern Hill, believing she’s inherited a refuge, but it’s just another cage, another trap. It owns her more than she owns it. So yes, in horror, when the question of leaving a haunted house comes up, so often the reasons for staying aren’t apparent. Maybe the family just bought the place—no roots, why stay? Even if you don’t immediately turn around and sell the house, you don’t have to sleep there, right? But Nellie stands her ground because this is her birthright, and she does so against the better judgment of her son, who reads books about haunted houses and knows exactly how it’s all going to turn out. She’s consumed by that idea of ownership. This is her house, goddamn it, why should she leave? She’s very much her grandfather’s granddaughter.
Also, on the subject of literal roots: we have a bed of ivy that grows near our house. Every now and then, I have to prune it. It’s strange, the way the ivy latches onto the brick, putting out little fingers to grip. This gave me an image, early in the writing process, of roots growing unseen inside a farmhouse wall. And nothing so innocuous as English ivy. Dark, fleshy, gnarled, wet roots with razor-sharp teeth. Thousands of them, reaching, crawling, reaching, crawling. It seemed to me that, after a while, the roots would become the house. Hold it up. And that’s the house that Nellie inherits. And roots, of course, have to emanate from some larger source, right? From some . . . thing.
JK: The house coming alive around Nellie and Max felt incredibly threatening. Those passages in the book seethe with tension. We’re so worried for their safety! Placing a mother and child in danger is a timeless horror theme. What made 1989 the correct historical period in which to set Nellie’s narrative?
AD: I was eleven years old in 1989. Max is eleven years old. As honestly as I could, I wanted to recapture how it felt to be that age. That’s when you’re one grand book or movie or song or experience away from becoming the person you want to be. But you’re also intensely vulnerable. You’re on the verge of forming a sense of self that’s going to define you for decades. Maybe for the rest of your life.
JK: The Hollow Kind is told from multiple points of view spanning several generations, giving you the opportunity to put on a lot of different dramatic masks. Do you have a favorite character? Given that he’s a sort of avatar, was that Max?
AD: Max was my favorite, but I’m really proud of all the character work I’ve done in this book. If I had to name a favorite individual passage, though, it’s probably related to Euphemia Redfern, August’s wife. She ultimately emerges as a malevolent force of nature. But before that, when the novel begins, she’s a pregnant, teenage bride. She gives birth to twins on Christmas Eve, and, in that scene, we get our first, unsettling glimpse of her future self. It’s all told from her point of view, detailing what she feels as she nurses her children for the first time. I really like that bit.
JK: I like it, too. It captures some of the complicated emotional responses to childbirth young mothers experience yet often feel they aren’t supposed to talk about. Your characters feel very real on the page. Do they feel real to you? When you finished writing, were you sad to leave the Redfern family behind?
AD: They absolutely feel real. That’s always the test of whether I’ve succeeded or failed, in my mind, at what I set out to do: is the parting of ways (when I move on to another project), bittersweet? If so, then the characters are alive. That said, I’m not sure anyone would be too sad to part ways with the Redferns—especially August and Euphemia.
JK: You’ve certainly given the story an adequate share of villains. People are seduced or infected by merely coming into contact with the Redfern property. In fact, you make several strong references to Lovecraft in describing the ancient evil inhabiting the land. But, unlike Lovecraft, you don’t merely suggest—you straight up show it to us! Did you set out writing with that intention? And will you be disappointed if your readers don’t go away gibbering?
AD: I’m the first to admit that my work is cosmic horror-adjacent. I borrow the weird things I love, then write my own stories irrespective of the conventions. To your point, though, I like to say cosmic horror or weird fiction operates on a need-to-know basis. As in: the reader, or the narrator, or the protagonist, they all desire to know what’s behind the veil, what’s in the cellar, what’s lurking beyond the threshold. It’s about the pursuit of the incomprehensible. But the writer only lets them glimpse so much—enough to scare them away or, yes, leave them gibbering.
In Lovecraft’s fiction—and the later works by others built on his mythos—that pursuit of arcane and terrible knowledge is often what propels the story. I tried to incorporate that into The Hollow Kind through August Redfern’s maps, his long disappearances into the woods. He’s searching for answers to a mystery and racing the clock of his own senility. At the beginning of the novel, he dies without fully knowing—or remembering—what it was that destroyed his family. He only remembers bits and pieces.
Admittedly, in the earlier drafts of the book, I didn’t explain much of the monster’s origins. A lot of that emerged during the editorial process. My editor kept asking questions—what it is, where it comes from—and her notes pushed me to really flesh out that history. Ultimately, it was the right call, if only because it helped me better understand the monster myself. However, I think I still left enough unsaid. It’s certainly a creature I’ll never fully comprehend.
JK: The intersection of cosmic horror and senility is fascinating to me, as is the unpredictability of the monster’s form. I’m thankful to your editor for helping the creature grow more massive. Many of us are fans of “sporror” (a portmanteau of spore and horror), and we dig all things fungal. Although you don’t get into biology in this book, I felt the mutating shapes and the mental or chemical connections the evil formed suggested a fungus. Is that way off the mark?
AD: Not necessarily. The monster has elements of a fungus. It gets inside your head, works at you from the inside out. It absorbs and reproduces within decomposing matter. In some instances, it even commandeers decomposing matter. But it’s also part animal—it has teeth, a burrow. It ingests its food. It imitates the environment in which it’s situated, so it’s part chameleon, too. And it’s part plant, akin to a Venus flytrap. Think Audrey II, but with bark. All that said, I’d classify it, first and foremost, according to its nature: it’s an imitator, a manipulator, a liar.
JK: The monster changes over the course of the book, which is deeply unsettling. And the way you’ve written it is visually startling. Pardon me for being obsessed with your “monster design,” although monster is far too simplistic of a word for what you’ve created. One more question about it: How the heck do you think anyone could film this book and do it justice?
AD: Hey, if they can make movies out of DeLillo novels, they can certainly make a movie out of my stuff! That said, I don’t think it’s the creature that presents the biggest challenge here. These days, with a computer and a rod puppet, you can do pretty much anything. I’d be more curious to see how a screenwriter would deal with the interwoven storylines. This is the first time I’ve written anything that bounces back and forth between timelines in such a structured way. I conceived the book almost as you might a limited series: as smaller stories within a larger narrative, all rooted—ha, see what I did there?—in character.
JK: Why do writers like puns and dad jokes so much? (You don’t have to answer that! It’s simply a fact.)
AD: Some writers are really good at puns. Not me, but some writers.
JK: Roots—Southern roots, specifically—feel like a big part of your writing, almost viscerally so. One great pleasure of reading The Hollow Kind—one no film could capture—is the lyrical cadence of your prose. Several key passages read like poetry. Tell me about your approach to restraint, plotting, and how you know when to let yourself cut loose.
AD: First, thanks so much for the praise. You write incredible prose, so that means a lot.
Whenever I pick up a novel, whether the marketers call it “literary” or “genre,” I look for lyrical prose. I’m drawn to it as a reader, so I strive for it in my own work. In fact, it’s what I love most about writing: crafting that killer sentence.
Sentences are arteries that carry the lifeblood of a story. But they should never outpace or overpower any other single element of the work. A book succeeds, for me, in the harmony of its parts. Ideally, everything works together. Place informs characters, characters inform story, story drives plot. The language is a vessel for all of that. So that’s the restraint, I guess: knowing when to throttle back on the lyricism and when to punch the gas. (Man, I’m mixing metaphors here.)
As for plot, this is how it works for me: once I know what a character wants, the story starts to come into focus. Story is, essentially, whatever conflict a character is wrestling with. What impedes them as they try to achieve the object of their desire? I figure out thirty, forty, sixty events that put a character through the ringer, and once I know these, I can write an outline that grows organically out of character. Once I’ve got a detailed outline, I’m free of the burden of figuring out the narrative as I work. That means I can sit down and plug away at what I consider the fun stuff: sentences, paragraphs, dialogue.
JK: That’s fascinating. To me, an outline is a burden. I like risking failure and diving into the unknown. There are so many different ways to write!
AD: I’ve failed too many times trying it the risky way. For the longest time, I tried. But I just couldn’t finish a book. I needed to have some sort of structure in place. But you’re right—there’s no one way to do it. That’s partly the pleasure of writing: how personal the process can be.
JK: Tell me more about what happens next for you after the outline is done.
AD: Sometimes the language gathers its own steam and I run with it, based on the emotion or momentum of a scene. Sometimes I pull back, get minimalist. There’s something to be said for six words doing the job of thirty. But it all happens in the moment of creation, what a scene calls for. Then it gets shaped and tamed later. I go through dozens of drafts.
As to whether film can do justice to language, I think cinema is just another form of translation, shifting words from one language to another. I’m thinking of directors with an eye for visuals like David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, P.T. Anderson, David Gordon Green. Or series like Fargo or Better Call Saul. Those shows, they have their own poetic idioms: wide landscape shots, color symbolism, subtle visual metaphors, split screens, sound effects. Even silence. What you see and hear can be every bit as lyrical as what you might read in a novel. Filmmakers with that sensibility, working on one of my books? What a dream that would be.
JK: Now I’m imagining The Hollow Kind as a film with stark contrasts between the simplicity of place and the grotesquerie of the monster, perhaps with a visual style that mutates as the plot progresses. (Tell Mr. Lynch he’s welcome to my idea.)
AD: I’ll let him know. I have his phone number, somewhere around here . . .
JK: You’ve said elsewhere that you didn’t write for many years after obtaining an MFA because you didn’t have much to say. I think this speaks to how important it is for a writer to live outside their head. It’s kind of great getting older, isn’t it?
AD: I think so,. Just owning a few cats teaches you a lot about life, you know? There’s probably a point of diminishing returns as we age, but for now, I’m mostly happy. Publishing after forty has been a real gift in that I’ve spent the last five years meeting new people and making new friends all over the world. How many people can say that once they reach mid-life?
JK: That’s a very balanced perspective. Gratitude is so important. What’s next for you?
AD: There’s always another project in the hopper. Right now, I’ve got a couple of outlines waiting to be turned into books and a third idea percolating. All horror, but also some Western vibes, some noir, some crime. I’d love to work in other mediums—comics, movies. I’ve got a lot left to learn about this trade, and that excites me.
Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Joe is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and the author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands, The Couvade, and Convulsive. They’ve had over fifty short stories published in books and journals like Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Vastarien, and The Queer Book of Saints. Joe has an MA in Contemplative Psychotherapy from Naropa University and a strong commitment to growing facial hair.
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