The Hole

The Hole, by Hye-Young Pyun, is an extremely creepy book that won the Shirley Jackson Award last year. Like Jackson's work, it not so much action that horrifies the reader, but an overwhelming sense of dread.

The book is about Oghi, a professor of geography, who has awakened from a coma. He learns that he was in a car accident that killed his wife, and he is unable to move. He, importantly, can not speak. His only family is his mother-in-law, who becomes his caregiver. And there's something not right about her. "His mother-in-law was the only family Oghi had left. And it finally hit him that it was the same for her too. They were each other’s sole surviving family members. Of course, had his wife lived, their relationship might have become a non-familial one. That very nearly happened. But not anymore. Oghi and his mother-in-law had lost that chance, and now they were stuck with each other." Things get really scary when she starts digging a hole in the front yard.

It's a gamble to write a story in which your antagonist can not do anything. All he can do is think. He is constantly humiliated by his mother-in-law. She brings in religious types who are taking her money which he knows is really his. "It irked him to no end to think that the money he’d saved over the years was slowly trickling over to some religious nutjobs, the intentions of whom were murky, via his mother-in-law’s hands and without his consent." When his colleagues come to visit, she acts inappropriately, and even changes his catheter, spills urine, and washes his penis in front of them.

No one understands his plight. He is able to write a message to his therapist, who misunderstands. Slowly his strength comes back and he plots an escape. But there is that hole, and it's not hard to figure out what it's for.

The Hole would make a great Twilight Zone episode, though it would need Oghi's thoughts as voiceovers. He doesn't have a particularly upbeat philosophy. "Life itself was merely an accumulation of failures, and those failures never made life better." He remembers his wife as trying to be a gardener, but failing spectacularly. She had always started things but could never complete them successfully.

The Hole is a grim little book that may have you thinking about it a while after reading it. It may well have you writing out your instructions should you become incapable to taking care of yourself, and imagining what it would be like if your mother-in-law were watching over you.