The Hollowing
core novel 1993 Mythago Wood
Record
| First published | 1993 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.97 (1,081 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 333 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780246138347 |
| Internal chronology | 3 |
Synopsis
The Hollowing returns to Ryhope Wood, exploring how mythagos, the mythic figures given physical form within the forest, can also be generated by the conscious focus of a living mind rather than only by the wood's ancient, ambient power, and how such deliberately created mythagos are drawn toward their creators. The novel follows a search connected to a disturbed young man drawn into the wood's influence, alongside researchers investigating the forest's stranger phenomena, including newly identified time slow zones within the wood where time passes at a radically different rate than in the outside world. As characters move deeper into Ryhope's shifting geography, the novel expands the cycle's exploration of how belief, trauma, and imagination shape the mythagos the wood produces, and the dangers of a mind too deeply entangled with its own creations.
Where it sits
- Universe: Mythago Wood
- Series: The Mythago Wood Cycle core; position 3 of 5 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert Holdstock
Notes
- From the series record (The Mythago Wood Cycle): The 5 Ryhope Wood novels. Mythago Wood (1984) is registered under its full-novel first-publication year, not the 1981 novella version that originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (expanded into the novel Holdstock actually intends as the series' true text) -- the same discipline applied under this project's textual-integrity rule elsewhere. Internal chronology among Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn and the others is left unpopulated (null), the same treatment used elsewhere for disputed or unrecorded chronologies: sources describe its events as substantially concurrent with/interleaved across the cycle rather than a clean linear slot, and Holdstock's own cycle page does not assert one; the other 4 novels' internal chronology values track publication order, which is the settled default for the rest of the cycle.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Mythago Wood Cycle: position 3 of 5: previous Lavondyss (1988) · next Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997)
- Internal chronology, within Mythago Wood: position 3 of 4: previous Lavondyss (1988) · next Avilion (2009)
Sources
← Mythago Wood dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.