These, our scientists, our physicians, the defenders of the physical world against the physical intrusions. The men who’d destroyed demons with labels and hypnosis and regressive discussion. They didn’t know. They’d killed God and now knew nothing. The future was as fuzzy as a cloudy ball or leaves left at the bottom of the mug. Throw the bones and see how they lie.
The most haunting works of fiction are generally so because they appeal to your worst fears or they leave you with questions. Those questions tend to shadow the nature of what you know, make you think twice about the reality around you. Karl Pfeiffer’s Hallowtide does that and more; taking human nature, reality, and the subconscious by the throat, poking and prodding it until it becomes twisted and believable.
Hallowtide is the story of Will Andrews, survivor of a school shooting five years previously, one that left him in a short coma. As the story begins, he’s on the verge of graduating college. He’s back with the girl he was dating during the shooting (Jennifer), and his reality is about to become tested. Through the course of the novel, Will descends into a Hell very unique to the representations that come before it. There, in his dreams, he is tormented by the shooter that he stopped years before. The nature of this “dreams” begin to change, and bleed into Will’s every day actions, to the point where nightmare becomes nature.
The construction of this novel is unlike any I’ve read before. It’s poetic, in the way that some sentences end, or seemingly end, only to bleed into the next paragraph, testing the reader’s reality as much as the characters. Lines that may seem repetitive the second or third time you read them, brilliantly add more to the plot, paragraphs or even pages later. The poetic style that Pfeiffer often returns to offers almost a modern update or interpretation of classic poems, like Inferno or Paradise Lost. Though, unlike most “descent” narratives, instead of seeing it from afar, you’re seeing it up close, from the eyes of the tormented, even feeling it. The reader experiences everything as Will does, and is often ripped back and forth between subjective realities in the short span of sentences and story breaks. The feeling is jarring, but is meant to be that way.
At the heart of Hallowtide is Jungian Theory, a type of analytical psychology that emphasizes the subconscious, and its power over the human mind. Carl Jung, the pioneer of this type of psychology, believed that understanding the human psyche could be found in dreams, myth, and folklore, and the idea of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious a theory that suggests that, we as humans, take personal experiences and organize them so that there is a universal interpretation across an entire species. Pfeiffer deconstructs this type of thinking, beautifully, and puts it back together in the story of Will, and in a way that makes it all his own.
When you read the final pages, and close the book, you immediately want to pick it back up again. This is the kind of book, that upon multiple rereads, has the ability to change, morph itself into something different. It has the ability to test multiple realities in the same person, to the point of frustration. Hallowtide is not meant to be enlightening, that’s not what it was designed for; instead, it’s a doorway to challenge the world around you, a doorway to questions you didn’t know you should be asking.
This is the most affecting psychological horror novel I’ve ever read. It bleeds Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the work of David Wong, but leaves a greater, more intense impact on the reader. Welcome to the debut novel of what is sure to become, one of the greatest writers of this generation.
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