Book Review: Grief Hollow

Title: Sour Roots

Author: Shawn Burgess

Date: 2022

Quote: "With each step they took, the forest grew darker."

In an unspecified deep, dark, creepy part of the Appalachian Mountains, worse things than mold and rot haunt a place soon to be known as Grief Hollow.

One of them is a nameless "fallen woman" who, over years of living alone with grief, shame, and revenge, has transformed into a nightmare creature in the general category of what mountain people used to call Boogers. (The word is probably of Celtic origin, but during some war or other it was deliberately confused with "Bulgarian" and words for what were supposed to be that country's bad habits.) Traditional Boogers were emissaries of the Devil who came to lead sinners to their judgment. They didn't need to look worse than ugly, sooty humans. The only description of them usually given is that they were black (from spending time in the Eternal Fire) and ugly. They led or carried people away to a gruesome fate.

This one, however, seems a bit more like the "Dogmen" of more recent urban legends from further west. The look of a "Dogman" has been explained as based on a view of a bear with a disease that can cause bears' fur to fall out Bears occasionally stand and walk on their hind feet. A bald bear on its hind feet looks a bit like a naked human with a dog's head, only bigger than either human or dog. It might be willing and able to eat a human alive. It would have leathery skin, black if it were the Appalachian Mountains' black bear, and lots of teeth and claws. If it made a sound, the sound would probably be a growl or snarl. That's how Westerners describe Dogmen. It's also how Shawn Burgess describes the resident of Grief Hollow in the 1920s.

In addition to the "honey" whose humanity died in Grief Hollow long ago, whose sole purpose for existing is to get revenge on him, the man who abandoned her has a brain-damaged son, a ladylike but minimally competent wife who's doomed to spend her life keeping her son out of sight, and two little daughters whose idea of rebellion is playing in the forest. Where, in the first chapter, first the children hear a malevolent whisper that they've "come home," then they find themselves running--feeling that they're being chased--toward a crumbling house, and then something with black leathery skin and a lot of teeth and claws eats them.

Meanwhile a turned-out sharecropper (in the Deep South they were usually Black, but in the mountains they were more often White) wanders past Grief Hollow. There a grieving father insists that he be hanged for the murder of the little girls of whom only bloodstained scraps have been found. After all, he's clearly not intelligent and he doesn't know the names of the places he's wandered through. The father wants to vent his feelings on somebody. It's not as if the sharecropper will be missed.

Drawing energy from the children, the monster from Grief Hollow shows herself to their mother and brother. Just describing what she's seen gets the mother declared insane. The brother, who's never been given credit for intelligence,  blathers about "the lady from the mist" being his friend...

The grief will grow from these sour roots for another hundred years, and three volumes, if you want to read them. If you like horror fiction, you probably will. The story is told vividly but tastefully, by the special standards applied to horror fiction, and points to Burgess for leaving the usual moonshiners and outhouses out of this story.