Why You'll Love This
A cursed forest, a hunt held once every fifty years, and a protagonist with no business surviving either — yet she enters anyway.
- Great if you want: dark fae fantasy with a defiant heroine and dangerous enemies
- The experience: fast-paced and atmospheric with rising tension that compounds quickly
- The writing: Peckham and Valenti layer threat and dark romantic pull with precision
- Skip if: you prefer standalone fantasy — this ends on a clear series hook
About This Book
Every fifty years, the Great Hunt begins — and only those desperate or reckless enough to enter a cursed forest full of ancient spirits and lurking shadows dare to compete. Our heroine is neither warrior nor Fae, but she steps into those trees anyway, driven by a need powerful enough to outweigh survival instinct. What waits inside is something far more dangerous than death, including a man — a monster — she never expected to face there. Peckham and Valenti build their world on that particular kind of dread that lives at the edge of fairytale logic: rules that must not be broken, darkness that has its own hunger, and a curse old enough to have teeth.
What distinguishes Hollow as a reading experience is how confidently it marries atmosphere with momentum. The prose keeps the pages turning while still letting the world feel genuinely eerie and lived-in — no small feat across 560 pages. Peckham and Valenti have a particular talent for tension between characters, threading slow-burn complexity into a plot that never stops moving. Readers who love morally complicated dynamics wrapped inside richly imagined dark fantasy will find this opening installment sets up its series with real intention.
