The Hollow Guest

When Emma Holloway inherits her grandmother's isolated Victorian mansion, she discovers more than crumbling walls and family secrets—she inherits a curse that has haunted the Holloway lineage for five generations. Something lives within Hollowbrook Manor's walls, an ancient entity born from a transcendentalist experiment gone catastrophically wrong in 1846. It feeds on human consciousness itself, consuming identities and leaving behind hollow shells that wear familiar faces but contain nothing within. As Emma loses hours, then days, to the entity's occupation of her body, she uncovers the terrible truth: her ancestors built the manor as both prison and sacrifice, each generation feeding themselves piece by piece to contain what should never have existed. Her grandmother spent fifty years slowly disappearing to keep the entity caged. But now the containment has failed, and the entity is spreading through the town, creating an army of hollow ones—empty vessels controlled by fragments of its predatory consciousness. Emma must wage war within her own mind, fighting for her identity while the entity offers a seductive alternative: cooperation, symbiosis, evolution into something beyond human limitation. Armed with generations of research hidden in the manor's walls and aided by a desperate parapsychologist, Emma discovers that defeating the entity requires the ultimate sacrifice—becoming the very emptiness it seeks to fill. The Hollow Guest is a literary horror exploration of what makes us human, the terror of losing oneself, and whether consciousness itself can evolve beyond its parasitic origins. Perfect for readers who appreciate psychological depth, atmospheric dread, and horror that questions the nature of identity itself. Themes: Consciousness and identity, generational trauma, psychological horror, the nature of self, symbiosis vs. parasitism, sacrifice and redemption Tone: Atmospheric, philosophical, psychologically intense, with literary prose that emphasizes internal struggle over external scares.