A review by anomieus
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is a horror novel.

But... 

It’s also a wonderfully creative and exuberant novel of the zombie apocalypse as seen through the ever-observant eyes of the salty, intrepid crow named S.T. and his faithful companion Dennis the Dog. It is, in turn, parts whimsy, sobering social commentary, classic-zombie-horror, and love letter to the natural world.

When the human world around pet crow S.T. and his housemate, Dennis the bloodhound, seems to start disintegrating, he’s mystified by what might be wrong with his human, Big Jim - particularly when his eyeball falls out.

“Big Jim’s eyeball fell out. Like, fell the fuck out of his head. It rolled onto the grass, and to be honest, Big Jim and I were both taken aback.”

S.T. realizes that his human best buddy has taken a turn for the worse and so he sets out with Dennis to see what’s what with the world and how to fix it, and Jim. His adventures are fraught with danger as he encounters the horrors of raging zombie humans and warring animals as the struggle for survival spreads throughout his city and around the world. This is a horror novel of survival in a disintegrating world cleverly mixed with the quixotic doings and nostalgic musings of a crow, a dog and all the new critters and life they meet along the way.

“So there we were. A rejected crow with an identity crisis partnering a bloodhound with the IQ of boiled pudding. We were perhaps the most pathetic excuse for an attempted murder on the face of the earth.”

The absolutely hysterical inner thoughts of the anthropomorphized S.T. and his interactions with other crows and species, all of whom are trying to figure out what to do with this new ‘MoFo’ (that’s people)-less world had me in laugh-out-loud stitches.

“Bald eagles are majestic as fuck.”

But to be clear, these moments of dry, droll corvid humour are mixed with truly tense, bloody horror as the humans tear into everything in their path. There are moments of sincere soul-searching and real wisdom about the nature of humanity and its appalling and narcissistic tendency towards inevitable destruction in this surprisingly spirited novel of the animals and world we will leave behind. 

“Sometimes I have the thought that a lot of species are hardwired to refuse to listen to warnings. And that's how they end up extinct.”

If this is the world that survives our self-annihilation, I am perfectly content with that.
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