Location: Home > Art, Architecture & Photography > Thrillers > Dark Hollow (Coronet books)

Dark Hollow (Coronet books)

Author: John Connolly
Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
Category: Book

List Price: ~~Ł6.99~~
Buy Used: Ł0.01
You Save: Ł6.98 (100%)

New (21) Used (114) Collectible (1) from Ł0.01

Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

17 reviews
Sales Rank: 69197

Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 4.4 x 1.3

ISBN: 0340729007
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780340729007
ASIN: 0340729007

Publication Date: October 11, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: UNREAD but may have a crease or mark or minor imperfections. In stock - Sent fast from British booksellers.

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Dark Hollow
•	Unknown Binding - Dark Hollow
•	Mass Market Paperback - Dark Hollow
•	Mass Market Paperback - Dark Hollow

Similar Items:

•	The White Road
•	Nocturnes
•	The Unquiet
•	The Overlook
•	The Underbury Witches (Open Door Series V)

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk Review
Recent years have seen a flurry of horror writers crossing over to the mystery genre--Peter Straub, Dan Simmons and Kristin Kathryn Rusch are three--but little movement has occurred in the opposite direction. Mysteries are where the commercial action is. When John Connolly, an Irish journalist, burst upon the scene in Great Britain in 1999 with the bestselling Every Dead Thing (it later won the Shamus award for Best First Private Eye Novel when published in the States), it would not have been unfair to describe what he was offering as "horror". However, "shock noir" is probably a better way of describing such a grab-you-by-the-eyelashes thriller, with its high body count and inventively grisly methods of dispatching hapless victims.

Connolly--who seems unconcernedly to be trespassing on Stephen King territory in Dark Hollow, with its Maine setting and echoes of background atrocities--actually brings to mind a slightly different hybridisation of horror and mystery: you might say it's Wilkie Collins re-tooled by James Ellroy. Lurking in his pages is more than a faint whiff of the Victorian triple-decker, with all its gothic complexities, while, at the same time, punctuating the plot are grotesque and excessive acts of sadism of a wholly modern sort that will cause some readers indignantly to close the book.

The trouble is, by doing that they miss a richly ripe, closely textured tale. Connolly's series character, ex-NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, is a man with a lot of pain to surmount--his wife and child were murdered in Every Dead Thing--but he's also a dogged knight errant attuned to the pain felt by others. In Dark Hollow, his quest for the truth is a twisty one, but he stays the course, and so should you. --Otto Penzler, Amazon.com

Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Much better than the first book July 17, 2008
P.I. Charlie Parker returns in the second novel in the series written by John Connolly. The story is about a murderer named Caleb Kyle who stalked and brutally murdered women over 30 years ago in a small town in Maine called Dark Hollow. Kyle disappeared many years ago and is now regarded as a myth or the bogeyman to locals who were too young to remember the hideous crimes. Now people are turning up dead again and all clues point to Dark Hollow and Caleb Kyle and the case that Charlie Parker's grandfather was investigating and was left unsolved 30 years ago.

I read Connolly's first novel starring Charlie Parker, Every Dead Thing, earlier this year and to be honest I wasn't all that impressed. I thought it was slow, over-the-top and the ending left me feeling very underwhelmed. Anyway, after the mass praise that this series has gotten from its readers I thought I'd stick with it and give the next one a chance and I am so glad I did as `Dark Hollow' was fantastic. It was fast-paced, action-packed, emotional and had good balance of horror and crime thriller elements that I felt worked really well.

From the opening chapter I was completely gripped as it felt like a mix between a mod novel and a good old-fashioned supernatural thriller. Parker's character is much more developed than he was in the previous novel with a great relationship between Louis and his partner Angel, who are equally as good characters as Parker and would make decent lead characters themselves. The story is full of twists and turns that kept me guessing all the way until the end and was never short of surprises.

The book is by no means perfect as there are a few things that let it down a little, such as the easy-kill, high body count. For a majority of the book I was sarcastically thinking "who cares if people get killed if they're bad guys?! It's not like it's illegal to kill people!!!". Oh well, I guess that's what makes it fiction I suppose.

Overall this was a thoroughly enjoyable book, if a little far-fetched, but had enough chills and suspense to keep me hooked all the way through. I now look forward to reading the rest of the series, as by going by other reviews on Amazon it looks as if this series only gets better.

4 out of 5 stars

getting better June 23, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

John Connolly's books came highly recomended to me but I have to say I was disappointed with Every Dad Thing. I decided to stick with them though and I'm glad I did. Dark Hollow is a creepy, atmospheric page-turner.

4 out of 5 stars

...run a mile. June 4, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Charlie Parker isn't a lucky man. A simple job of getting child maintenance for a client turns into a hunt for a killer that's linked to an old lady's fear of a man called Caleb Kyle and pile of money that a lot of people are eager to get there hands on. It's a mess that Charlie can't avoid stepping in.

Connolly puts you in the action from the very first page as he sets up the events that snowball throughout Dark Hollow. The plotting is tighter than a washing line on a windy day. Just when you think you know what is going on the action snaps in another direction.

Added to that, Connolly is a well read and intelligent writer who doesn't shy away from the details and doesn't dumb down for the reader. This can make for a challenging read, not because it's complicated in anyway, it's more the depths of darkness he descends as he explores the more disturbing parts of human nature.

Parker's world isn't one you'd see on your average cop show on TV. It's one where you kill or be killed and that's another thing that is different about Connolly's detective. He isn't pure and greater than the criminals. He's only just about on the right moral side.

This first person-tale is well worth reading. I'd suggest reading Every Dead Thing first as it explains why Parker is so haunted by the dead and what fuels his actions.

4 out of 5 stars

Excuse me but would you buy my other book please? October 1, 2006
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

This is the second in the Charlie `Bird' Parker series, and of course that means there was a first : Every Dead Thing. Now, you don't need to have read that to enjoy Dark Hollow, but author John Connolly would really like you to. I have never seen so many references to a previous story before! Fortunately I'm not so sad that I actually counted how many times he did it, but suffice to say that it was several times too many. The main bit of history that private investigator Bird brings to this novel is that his wife and daughter were horribly murdered a year earlier, and since this is mentioned on the back cover, the reader will know this before turning a single page. But Connolly is determined to promote his previous book at every single opportunity and I found this distracting to the point that it undermined what was otherwise a very good and well-written story.

If anything it's a more cohesive and better constructed novel, probably because it was written more quickly - Every Dead Thing took him over five years to write. This time around the characters are more universally relevant to the central story, and few if any strands are left unfinished. In essence, it's about Bird looking for a man called Caleb Kyle, a man who has apparently achieved mythical status as a ghost-like figure whose very existence is not possible to verify with any certainty. Occasionally the writer drifts into a style of writing that in later years becomes something of a signature method, that being the surreal worlds of the supernatural. I have only read these first two books so far but I am lead to believe that in future stories Connolly dwells more deeply into these dream-like states, and as long as he manages to maintain a degree of confusion in the reader's mind that leads us to doubt whether the ghosts are real or imagined, then I think that would work, as it does in Dark Hollow. To an extent, the lasting memories of the tale are these after-life experiences, because in most other respects the story is relatively conventional. Connolly is very good at creating a sense of atmosphere, and successfully manages to bring several of our senses to life in our own visualisations of events. These include feeling the coldness of the north Maine landscape and its wintry isolation, together with the smells of the natural environment and, on occasion, of death itself.

In fact death seems to follow Bird wherever he goes, and if it doesn't then he arranges it himself. The police have little love of Charlie `Bird' Parker yet they seem to turn a blind eye when he shoots a baddie through the heart. Connolly has a liking for wrapping his stories around the colourful characters found in the seedy underworld of organised crime, when in reality they serve more as distractions from the fundamental story. He spends considerable time in describing some of them - more so than number one villain Caleb Kyle for example - yet they are peripheral characters of minor significance to the plot as a whole. In this respect there is something of an imbalance, as there was on a much bigger scale in Every Dead Thing. In the end, though, Caleb Kyle was less charismatic than his counterpart in The Travelling Man in the debut novel, and Bird's emotional rollercoaster in grieving for his wife and daughter has fewer twists and turns this time round. I also longed for a character as truly magical as the medium Tante Marie Aguillard from the earlier novel, but there was no-one to take her place this time round. Fortunately the gay hit-men pairing of Louis and Angel, Bird's back-up crew, have prominent roles and their presence is always welcome.
I'm still on the fence when it comes to assessing John Connolly, despite reading his first two novels and buying two more as yet unread. His prose is of a high standard and his imagery is likewise top-notch, but I am already sensing a gun-slinging PI stereotype novel that may have already fired its best shots. I shall have to wait and see - in the meantime, give this book a try, it's worth the investment. Oh and don't forget the one before as well.....

5 out of 5 stars

MENACING CHARACTERS IN SHIVER PRODUCING CLIMES December 25, 2005
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

With an opening line signaling devilish doings, "I dream dark dreams," Irish thrillersmith John Connolly launches his second suspenseful tale featuring New York policeman turned private investigator Charlie Parker. Connolly copped the 2000 Shamus Award for his debut, "Every Dead Thing." "Dark Hollow" assures readers that he deserved it.

Unable to set aside the murders of his wife and daughter, a haunted Parker returns to his hometown of Scarborough, Maine. Rather than finding solace in the northeast woods Parker is faced with a series of seemingly unrelated mysteries and a terrifying sociopathic mobster, Tony Celli.

Oddly enough the current series of murders are remarkably akin to 40-year-old killings - crimes that Parker's grandfather spent most of his life trying to solve. What is the connection between today's violence and killings almost half a century old?

Author Connolly pulls out all the stops with this highly readable, almost surreal tale involving mysterious forces lurking in the wilderness, and a long buried past seemingly rising from the grave. Connolly's an ace at creating menacing characters and shiver producing climes.

- Gail Cooke