Miles Warren hails from a long line of psychics. Resigned to a life in the family business, Miles is perfectly happy, thank you very much. Apart from the fact he hasn’t told anyone he’s gay, and that he’s constantly exhausted from long nights spent wrangling angry ghosts in creepy cemeteries. Perfectly happy.
But Miles’s comfortable routine is interrupted when he starts having visions of an unfamiliar boy. He soon learns the stranger is Gabriel Hawthorne, whose family have a mysterious, decades-long feud with Miles’s own—and that the visions are a premonition of his murder. Gabriel is everything Miles expects from a Hawthorne: rude, haughty, irritatingly good-looking. But that doesn’t mean Miles is just going to stand by and let someone kill him.
The two form an uneasy alliance, trying to solve Gabriel’s murder before it happens. As they begin to unravel the web of secrets between their families, and with dark magic swirling around them, Miles is horrified to realize that he doesn’t hate Gabrielquiteas much as he’s supposed to. He might even like him.
Too bad Gabriel is probably going to die.
I’m always wanting to have an October full of horror/spooky book reviews, but the way I read/review (slowwww), I’d need to be reading the spooky books in September.
Or just reviewing books a lot closer to when I finish them than I typically do (an endless struggle). Either way, I’ve been reading a decent amount of horror this month, but how much of it I actually review before the end of the month remains to be seen.
Anyhow. On to THE HOLLOW AND THE HAUNTED, a Halloween season gem! I had seen the cover for this one and/or heard a bit about it in passing, but this one wasn’t necessarily on my radar. But Titan reached out to ask if I’d like a copy, and the synopsis and comps to THE RAVEN CYCLE really grabbed my attention. And yeah, wow. What an absolute treat this book is.
You ever feel like you started just the right book, at just the right time, and maybe (just maybe) the book was written to appeal to you, specifically? Because that’s my overall reaction to THE HOLLOW AND THE HAUNTED, the debut novel by Camilla Raines.
I don’t really know where Titan falls in terms of whether or not they consider any of their titles proper YA, but I definitely think this book will have tremendous appeal to YA readers. It’s drawn some comparisons to CEMETERY BOYS, a book that’s always in my “definitely maybe soon” pile. But this one for sure put me in a very similar mindset as two of my very favorite YA series, the aforementioned RAVEN CYCLE, as well as Susan Dennard’s soon-to-be-completed LUMINARIES trilogy.
This one is set in Washington State because of course it is. There’s just something so evocative & moody about the Pacific Northwest, and Raines captures the cozy/rainy/foggy/vaguely ominous vibe in such vivid detail. Oof, this book really seeps into your skin.
When we meet our main character, Miles Warren, he’s literally digging up a grave. At one in the morning.
On a school night.
Miles is exhausted, but his family is in the business of the supernatural, and he’s a big part of it. They help families in need when things go bump in the night, and they take a lot of pride in what they do. It’s a busy household too! Miles has younger sisters, as well as a cousin (Charlee…she and Miles are super close) and an aunt in the house, along with his parents. There’s a lot of great family dynamics at play here, and a lot of pain and grief too. The Warrens feel like such an authentic family, and I loved so much about spending time under their roof.
On the other side of town is the Hawthorne family: wealthy, cold, manipulative. Everything the Warrens are not. There’s some very bad blood between the two families…some of this is deeply personal & central to the plot. Some of it is because the Hawthorne’s have kind of snatched up a lot of the supernatural-related business in town, by less than savory means. So they’re pretty frowned upon but have Thistle (the town where the story takes place) in their grip.
Miles begins having extremely disturbing visions in which a boy he doesn’t know dies. But at a Hawthorne party that Miles gets dragged to (keeping up appearances and all), he learns the boy is none other than Gabriel Hawthorne, the middle son of the three Hawthorne boys.
Determined to crack the case of who plans to murder Gabriel, the two boys go into research mode (goddamn, the Buffy fan in me will always love some research mode!!!), while also trying to avoid revealing to their respective families that they’re spending time together.
And Miles & Gabriel are also very, very slowly replacing their stinging barbs & biting sarcasm with…actual feelings?
I kinda loved everything about this. The characters are so well written, top to bottom. Miles is an incredibly endearing protagonist & someone that’s so easy to root for. He’s not just from a line of psychics/paranormal investigators, he’s also a deeply powerful empath. So he just feels everyone’s emotions around him in a way that can be quite debilitating. But he’s just a big-hearted, lovable, awkward teenager & I wanted to wrap him up in a big hug. He’s only out to a small number of people (it may just be Charlee, I kind of forget), and that’s a part of his story too. I liked the dynamics here, where Miles isn’t exactly afraid or concerned about his parent’s reaction. He’s just…not ready.
Which of course means dealing with his Mom’s attempts to set him up with girls. Yikes.
This one just captured my whole heart. I also typically never say things like this in reviews, but GODDAMN this one has a wild ending, so I personally need a second book. Right away.
Yeah, this was just completely perfect for this time of year, and I’m so happy I got the chance to read this one! Big thanks to Titan for sending this one along!
Grimdark Dad 