- Title: Rarity from the Hollow
- Author:
- Web site link: www.lacydawnadventures.com
- Genre:
Nontraditional SF/F, Cross-Genre
- ISBN:
9781907133060; 1907133062
- Name of Reviewer: Bryan Zepp Jamieson
- Journal: The
Electric Review, A Universe on the Edge
- Publishd 2012 by Doghorn Publishing
Lacy Dawn is a little girl who lives in a magical forest
where all the trees love her and she has a space alien friend who adores her and
wants to make her queen of the universe. What’s more, all the boys admire her
for her beauty and brains. Mommy is very beautiful and Daddy is very smart, and
Daddy’s boss loves them all.
Excerpt
Lacy Dawn, the eleven year old protagonist, perches
precariously between the psychosis of childhood and the multiple neuroses of
adolescence, buffeted by powerful gusts of budding sexuality and infused with a
yearning to escape the grim and brutal life of a rural Appalachian existence. In
this world, Daddy is a drunk with severe PTSD, and Mommy is an insecure wraith.
The boss is a dodgy lecher, not above leering at the flat chest of an
eleven-year-old girl.
Yes, all in one book.
Rarity From The
Hollow is written in a simple declarative style that’s well-
suited to the imaginary diary of a desperate but intelligent eleven-year-old –
the story bumping joyfully between the extraordinary and the
banal.
The central planet of the universe is a vast shopping
mall, and Lacy Dawn must save her world from a menace that arrives in the form
of a cockroach infestation. Look again and the space alien has made Daddy smart
and happy – or at least an eleven year old girl’s notion of what a smart and
happy man should be. He has also made Mommy beautiful, giving her false teeth
and getting the food stamp lady off her back.
About the only thing in the book that is believable is
the nature of the narrative voice, and it is utterly compelling. You find
yourself convinced that “Hollow” was written as a diary-based autobiography by a
young girl and the banal stems from the limits of her environment, the
extraordinary from her megalomania. And that’s what gives Rarity From The Hollow a chilling, engaging
verisimilitude that deftly feeds on both the utter absurdity of the characters’
motivations and on the progression of the plot.
Indeed, there are moments of utter darkness: In one
sequence, Lacy Dawn remarks matter-of-factly that a classmate was whipped to
death, and notes that the assailant, the girl’s father, had to change his
underpants afterward because they were soiled with semen. Odd, and often
chilling notes, abound.
As I was reading it, I remembered when I first read
Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” at the age of 14. A veteran of Swift, Heller, and
Frederick Brown, I understood absurdist humour in satire, but Vonnegut took that
understanding and turned it on its ear.
In the spirit of Vonnegut, Eggleton (a psychotherapist
focused on the adolescent patient) takes the genre and gives it another quarter
turn. A lot of people hated Vonnegut, saying he didn’t know the rules of good
writing. But that wasn’t true. Vonnegut knew the rules quite well, he just chose
to ignore them, and that is what is happening in Eggleton’s novel, as
well.
Not everyone will like Rarity From The Hollow. Nonetheless, it
should not be ignored.
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