Hollow

"Brilliantly wrought... Wonderful... Catling's expertise, imagination and linguistic flair are well matched by his wit and enthusiasm. Hollow is never less than tremendous fun... Catling is a great and wild talent... a raucous novel that thrills and unsettles in equal measure." - TLS

"Prose that's sprinkled with neologisms and archaisms, and as crunchy and bitter-cold as snow... it's a nigh unclassifiable work, and all the better for that." - Financial Times

"As with all the best fiction, there is a terrifying inevitability about Hollow... Let it devour you." - Iain Sinclair, author of Ghost Milk

"Unsettling and delightful... very clever fun... a sheer, shuddering delight... both frightening and hilarious. Catling is a rare kind of writer." - Scotland on Sunday

From the author of the Vorrh Trilogy comes an epic odyssey following a group of mercenaries hired to deliver a church's ultimate power—a sacred oracle—as the decadence of carnival gives way to the gravity of Lent and the mystic landscape grows ravenous, all set within a Bosch painting.

The history of art contains no more imaginative or mysterious paintings than the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. Art historians ask where the weird creatures depicted there came from, and so too do the central characters of Hollow as they fight their way across these landscapes and encounter these creatures. Author B. Catling is the first novelist to engage fully with Bosch's vision and climb imaginatively into it.

In this novel, it emerges that Bosch gave colour and form to monsters, 'letting them in' to the real world, and that they were still infesting the landscape when it was painted by Bosch's follower, Pieter Bruegel.

Now, a wild bunch of mercenaries with a mission to deliver an oracle made of cloth, bones, and a loud voice take a dangerous journey to the monastery at the base of the Tower of Babel, where the most terrifying secret in the world is kept. As they travel through a country painted first by Bosch and then by Bruegel, they are confronted and seduced by monsters and see scenes painted by them. These include the devil playing dice, a lewd mock wedding with a dirty bride, an unholy being living inside a hollow tree and riding a giant rat, and creatures indulging in inter-species sexual play as depicted in The Garden of Earthly Delights. A local marauding woman called Mad Meg with a small army of looting women from Bruegel's Dull Gret is one of this novel's stranger characters.