Some hungers never die.
Set against the backdrop of small-town Michigan from 1971 to 2021, The Hollowing is a chilling literary thriller inspired by real events, weaving together supernatural horror, psychological trauma, and the long, silent echoes of a buried crime. When a series of disappearances spanning decades is finally disturbed by a grieving mother's search for truth, a forgotten evil begins to stir-and the cost of forgetting reveals itself as unbearably human.
At the center of the novel is Lauren, a quiet, artistic girl whose drawings trace a dark cycle no one wants to see. As the years slip by, ghosts become memories, and memories begin to haunt. Across town and time, another mother-Kathy-refuses to let grief grow cold. Her relentless search for her daughter, Elara, leads her to a chilling realization: the truth has always been buried, and it is not done feeding.
Told in layered perspectives and fragmented time, The Hollowing explores what it means to carry silence, to live beside horror, and to finally face what we refuse to name. The novel slowly unravels the boundary between supernatural and psychological, culminating in a harrowing reckoning where evil is stripped of its mask-and what remains is deeply, devastatingly human.
Rich in atmosphere and lyricism, The Hollowing is as much ghost story as it is elegy, as much psychological thriller as it is a meditation on memory, complicity, and the long echo of violence. Fans of The Silent Patient, The Changeling, or The Little Friend will find resonance here, but Clark's voice is entirely his own: elegiac, sharp, and unflinching.
