Book Review: "The Hollow Tree" by James Brogden

James Brogden is an author who is really growing on me. His book Hekla's Children was fantastic, but my favourite so far has been Bone Harvest. Folk horror, as you know, is possibly one of my favourite sub-genres (if not, number one) ever. It is difficult to do folk horror well because more than often, authors get carried away with making the stories as convoluted as possible when simplicity and depth happens to be the actual key to creating a vast amount of atmosphere and mythos. Mythology and legends is definitely something you need in this sub-genre and this is not lost upon Brogden in writing this particular novel. It wasn't perfect but I very much enjoyed it.

So this starts with our protagonist going on a boat trip. Now, the fact that most of these books are set in my hometown means that I can tell what they are partially based on. If you remember Why It's Shifty then you perhaps remember me talking about some folklore to come from where I live. If you don't, here it is:

This is what the book is somewhat based on. There's a dead woman in a tree but that's beside the point for now. Our protagonist breaks her arm so badly that her hand is crushed and needs amputating. She has one hand, her husband is a bit freaked out by it and now she's having dreams about a tree. She is also envisioning large bugs everywhere and if you know a thing or two about that, it might actually be explained as a hallucination of masses of medications rather than simply folk horror. Now, a lot of this story takes a long time to actually get started and there's a huge amount of exposition going on. The meat of the story gets a very short amount of time because we're not really there yet.

The writing is pretty good though our author seems to be relying on body horror more so than folk horror. If you're well versed in folk horror, Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? seems like too obvious a choice to base a novel on. When I figured it out I was less than impressed if I'm going to be perfectly honest. It seems to have already been beaten like a dead horse. Apart from this, the book was still fun to read. It contains a large amount of dreamscape and nightmare fuel courted by our main character, Rachel - as she manages a new lifestyle due to her horrific injury. This is also amped up by her guilt in possibly causing the illness of her husband when he comes down with some sort of terrifying respiratory infection which puts him in the hospital.

Within this story, we actually get to see these dreamscapes which are had by Rachel whilst asleep and are to do with the possible identities of the woman in the tree and how she died. One of them being a spy who is killed after trying to escape her shady employment only to be betrayed by the one person she thought she could trust. Now, it does seem like the author was trying to tell us a story which consisted mainly of a build up, but you don't really see what's truly happening until much later on which unfortunately, makes some parts of the book seem rather repetitive and drawn out for not much reason. I'm all for descriptive scenes and intense atmosphere, I'm not for reading about wandering thoughts of the main character or repetitive scenes that they have already somewhat mused on.

All in all, it was an average book for James Brogden. Not as bad as Plague Stones but definitely not as enthralling as Bone Harvest (which was fantastic if you ever get to read it. Folk horror fans everywhere require that book in their lives). I will continue seeking out works by this author, but for now I think I can safely say that what might be fun, doesn't always have to be perfectly written as what is perfectly written isn't always defined only as 'fun'. This is one of those books. I did find it fun, but it definitely wasn't his best effort at horror.

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