The Grief Hole

There are many grief holes.

There's the grief hole you fall into when a loved one dies.

There's another grief hole in all of us; small or large, it determines how much we want to live.

And there are the places, the physical grief holes, which attract suicides to their centre.

Sol Evictus, a powerful, charismatic singer, sends a young artist into The Grief Hole to capture the faces of the teenagers dying there. When she inevitably dies herself, her cousin Theresa resolves to stop this man so many love.

Theresa sees ghosts; she knows how you'll die by the spirits haunting you. If you'll drown, she'll see drowned people. Most often she sees battered women, because she works to find emergency housing for abused women.

She sees no ghosts around Sol Evictus but she doesn't let that stop her. Her passion to help, to be a saint, drives her to find a way to destroy him.

“The Grief Hole, like all Kaaron Warren’s horror fiction, has a particular nightmare flavour. On one level it’s a pure, anguished howl against the exploitation and abuse of the powerless. On another it’s like The Slap with added bamboo under the fingernails. Ghosts weep and grotesques loom against a cruelly barren, detritus-littered suburban background. You wouldn’t trust half these characters as far as you could throw them, and the other half you wouldn’t want to be. But beneath their machinations runs a continuous trickle of laughter so faint it might be pity, it might be inky tears. You can’t help but follow them, full of dread, into the darkness.”

– Margo Lanagan, best selling author and prize winner in speculative fiction

“It takes a writer of Kaaron Warren’s talent and imagination to unflinchingly convey the horrors of the real world. The Grief Hole is one of the most effective and affecting ghost stories I’ve ever read.”

– Jeffrey Ford, multiple international award-winning fantasy author

“Kaaron Warren’s THE GRIEF HOLE is a powerhouse of a novel; creepy, disturbing, and genuinely moving. Theresa’s interventions and, of course, the devastating aftermaths will haunt you long after you finish this book.”

– Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock