Hollow - Brian Catling (Paperback) 30-06-2022
___________________________________________________________________________________ "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 that 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 t