Content Warning: In general, House of Hollow depicts body horror and gore.

Prologue Summary

Iris Hollow, 17, recalls a memory from age 10, when a strange woman broke into her family’s home and cut off a lock of her white hair with sewing scissors. The woman then smelled her hair, tasted it, and swallowed it. Iris was initially too scared to scream but upon shrieking, her older sisters, Vivi and Grey, and their mother, Cate, tackled the woman.

The woman injured Vivi and Cate, but Grey subdued her, held her face, and kissed her. Within moments, the woman “stopped,” her eyes faraway, limbs “so liquid she could no longer stand” (2). The police reported the woman was high on methamphetamine and had stalked the Hollow family before breaking in. She was obsessed with the Hollow girls’ story, something that happened to them three years ago. Iris can’t fully remember the incident, but people still theorize about the mystery of the three suddenly white-haired, black-eyed sisters.

Iris was highly aware of her and her sisters’ strangeness after the break-in. She recalls Vivi breaking a man’s jaw for pulling him into her car, a teacher Grey hated kissing her neck in front of the class and getting fired, and her own bully shaving her head during a school assembly (after she told her sisters about the bully).