The small town where 17-year-old Hollis Brown has spent his life is “a forgotten American dreamscape”—the type of marginal Midwestern community that survived a mass exodus of industry, but no longer has the means to start over somewhere new.
Hollis has loving parents and fiercely protective best friends, but there is a gnawing emptiness inside him that eats away at any light that tries to get in. Sometimes the only way he knows to fight that feeling is to say something he shouldn’t to someone he shouldn’t, and accept the confrontations that result.
When Hollis finds himself falsely accused of a violent assault after the annual all-nighter in the town’s abandoned, supposedly haunted factory, the feelings he’s never known how to handle overflow. It’s here, in his most vulnerable state, that Walt finds him.
Walt, a gaunt and disheveled teen, appears in the woods where Hollis is hiding and licking his wounds. The boy piques Hollis’ sense of generosity, and after Hollis offers Walt his coat and some food, Walt reciprocates with an offer to help Hollis repair the mess of his life. It’s only under the cold light of a streetlamp, standing at the crossroads of an empty intersection, that Hollis realizes he’s getting much, much more than he bargained for.
The Corruption of Hollis Brown is another stunning addition to novelist K. Ancrum’s extraordinary catalog. Like many of Ancrum’s other works, it’s a complex story that’s difficult to categorize by genre. It’s not quite horror, though it contains an eerie atmosphere. It’s a love story, but not just between two people, and not only romantic. Ancrum’s brilliance lives in the margins of these things, where reality, belief and truth spiral around each other like so many diverging—and converging—paths.
Like most of Ancrum’s books, The Corruption of Hollis Brown is written entirely in sharply vivid vignettes, like the literary equivalent of macrophotography, containing intimacy on a grand scale that makes the reader want to both back away and lean closer.
In Hollis and Walt’s story, Ancrum allows for the inherent weirdness of being queer: the grotesque, the joyful and the beautiful. She conveys the intensity of feeling that exists in adolescence: the agony of depression, of loving someone, of hating yourself, of wanting to love yourself. But Ancrum is kind to her characters. Even when she sets a trap, she pulls out a net to catch them.
This kindness rings through to the end of The Corruption of Hollis Brown. It’s a graceful reminder that our ghosts don’t all need to be exorcised. Sometimes they just need to be seen.