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Notes from Underground: The Hollow Earth Story Cycle
A boy becomes fascinated with an elderly, insect-eating neighbor; inhuman bodies begin to wash ashore in a small coastal town; a closed rest stop that played host to a horrific crime may be a gateway to another world; the exhumation of a magician’s grave reveals an empty coffin...
Travel to subterranean realms with Orrin Grey in his latest collection, Notes from Underground: The Hollow Earth Story Cycle. These seven uncanny tales include works featured at Pseudopod and in The Best Horror of the Year, as well as the new novelette “Leandra’s Story,” and together form a linked story sequence of cosmic horror and masterful strangeness.
Travel to subterranean realms with Orrin Grey in his latest collection, Notes from Underground: The Hollow Earth Story Cycle. These seven uncanny tales include works featured at Pseudopod and in The Best Horror of the Year, as well as the new novelette “Leandra’s Story,” and together form a linked story sequence of cosmic horror and masterful strangeness.
- GenresHorror
224 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2025
1 person is currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Orrin Grey
104 books351 followersOrrin Grey is a skeleton who likes monsters. When asked, he claims to mostly write oubliettes.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 1, 2025
I finally read the Dostoevsky classic Notes From Underground. Who knew that Russian scholars were believers in the Hollow Earth theory?
October 31, 2025
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: A linked cycle where cults, beetles, and underworlds elbow each other for the mic, then harmonize into a single greasy hymn about what replaces us when we finally screw the pooch. Distinct for its unified mythos and pulpy sincerity that still pricks like a fishbone.
Orrin Grey has long been the nice ghoul of weird fiction, the guy who loves rubber-suit monsters and midnight movies yet writes with a librarian’s care for lore. Here he welds that sensibility into a single chassis, less a greatest-hits and more a field guide to one big nightmare ecology. The book gathers earlier tales and new work into a true story cycle, with “Leandra’s Story” and “Pandora” placed as structural keystones so the whole thing reads like one long descent with multiple side tunnels. The Hollow Earth, in Grey’s hands, is not just pulp spelunking with dinosaurs in pith helmets. It is a pressure system under culture and time, a place where myths cross-breed and futures leak backward.
Our viewpoints are ordinary folks who trip into the irregularities. A delivery kid and an aging “psychic” who eats cicadas get visited by a beetle-thing that might be from the future. A coastal photographer tracks corpses that keep washing ashore full of anemones and light, then finds a church where eel-wrapped Christ presides over a drowned congregation waiting to be remade. Across stories the same machinery hums: cults, tunnels, luminous bones, and a creeping sense that successors are already practicing how to wear our skulls.
The collection behaves like a conspiracy corkboard that actually connects. Scenes stick. In “The Insectivore,” the porch glows purple while Mr. Petrie kneels in prayer to an armored figure with antennae, a moment equal parts tender and apocalyptic, ending in a flash of “plasma” that reads like divine execution by way of entomology. In “New, and Strangely Bodied,” bioluminescent phalanges press a handprint to the video-store glass, the body collapsing into black water and bones as if the ocean itself forgot how to person. And Grey’s best gag is quiet: a VHS labeled “Blum, ’73 — New Man,” the temptation of secret knowledge literally sitting in a tape deck like Chekhov’s cursed cassette. None of this is cheap gotcha. The images feel curated from a lifetime of grubby paperbacks and late-night cable, then tempered with melancholy.
The collection runs on controlled sentences and camera-ready blocking. Grey favors lucid, conversational prose with sly punchlines tucked at paragraph ends. He chooses close first-person or intimate limited third that keeps the monsters slightly offstage, which makes their entrances feel like someone yanked the bulb in the projector and spliced in a frame from a different film. Pacing is unfussy, built from clean beats: a rumor, a visit, a reveal, a small choice with bad consequences. Dialogue is light, voices human, and the image system repeats with purpose — violet light, carapaces, church detritus repurposed into sea altars — so that, by midbook, any mention of a glow or a shell becomes a doorbell you brace for. The cycle structure matters. Because “Leandra’s Story” and “Pandora” act as anchor points, callbacks register as fate rather than Easter eggs, and the book achieves that rare short-story-collection trick where the whole feels heavier than the pile.
Grey is gnawing on replacement and faith. The body horror is not just gross, it is metaphysical: organisms colonize bones like tenants after an evacuation, an elegant way to literalize the fear that identity is a lease and nature keeps the deed. The cult material is sympathetic rather than sneering. People grasp at patterns because entropy is a bully, and if a preacher says the new race of man comes from the sea, well, you can hear the surf from the parking lot. The book is briny and tender, a question more than a thesis: if something smarter, meaner, or simply better adapted is coming, are we obligated to fight it, welcome it, or make sure it learns from our worst habits before it inherits the keys. The next morning I remembered the eel-wound crucifix and felt weirdly protective of my bones.
This is Grey’s most unified book, a capstone to his museum-of-monsters vibe that threads his obsessions into a single, durable rope. It sits neatly beside recent folk-cosmic hybrids while remaining unabashedly in love with the kind of retro adventure furniture that new-weird often pretends it never borrowed.
It is a cohesive, moody walk through one very idiosyncratic underworld where the jokes are kind, the images bite, and the whole adds up to more than a scrapbook, which is exactly what I claimed up top.
Read if you crave linked-weird mythmaking that connects porch lights, pulp paperbacks, and esoteric churches into one subterranean atlas; you can handle gentle humor rubbing elbows with genuine dread and occasional goo; you love the feeling of a monster movie that keeps cutting to an empty hallway until something finally steps in.
Skip if you need clean answers about cosmology, taxonomy, and who built what tunnel when; you hate story cycles and want either a pure novel or totally standalone shorts; you require set-piece gore over slow, sea-salt creep.
TL;DR: A linked cycle where cults, beetles, and underworlds elbow each other for the mic, then harmonize into a single greasy hymn about what replaces us when we finally screw the pooch. Distinct for its unified mythos and pulpy sincerity that still pricks like a fishbone.
Orrin Grey has long been the nice ghoul of weird fiction, the guy who loves rubber-suit monsters and midnight movies yet writes with a librarian’s care for lore. Here he welds that sensibility into a single chassis, less a greatest-hits and more a field guide to one big nightmare ecology. The book gathers earlier tales and new work into a true story cycle, with “Leandra’s Story” and “Pandora” placed as structural keystones so the whole thing reads like one long descent with multiple side tunnels. The Hollow Earth, in Grey’s hands, is not just pulp spelunking with dinosaurs in pith helmets. It is a pressure system under culture and time, a place where myths cross-breed and futures leak backward.
Our viewpoints are ordinary folks who trip into the irregularities. A delivery kid and an aging “psychic” who eats cicadas get visited by a beetle-thing that might be from the future. A coastal photographer tracks corpses that keep washing ashore full of anemones and light, then finds a church where eel-wrapped Christ presides over a drowned congregation waiting to be remade. Across stories the same machinery hums: cults, tunnels, luminous bones, and a creeping sense that successors are already practicing how to wear our skulls.
The collection behaves like a conspiracy corkboard that actually connects. Scenes stick. In “The Insectivore,” the porch glows purple while Mr. Petrie kneels in prayer to an armored figure with antennae, a moment equal parts tender and apocalyptic, ending in a flash of “plasma” that reads like divine execution by way of entomology. In “New, and Strangely Bodied,” bioluminescent phalanges press a handprint to the video-store glass, the body collapsing into black water and bones as if the ocean itself forgot how to person. And Grey’s best gag is quiet: a VHS labeled “Blum, ’73 — New Man,” the temptation of secret knowledge literally sitting in a tape deck like Chekhov’s cursed cassette. None of this is cheap gotcha. The images feel curated from a lifetime of grubby paperbacks and late-night cable, then tempered with melancholy.
The collection runs on controlled sentences and camera-ready blocking. Grey favors lucid, conversational prose with sly punchlines tucked at paragraph ends. He chooses close first-person or intimate limited third that keeps the monsters slightly offstage, which makes their entrances feel like someone yanked the bulb in the projector and spliced in a frame from a different film. Pacing is unfussy, built from clean beats: a rumor, a visit, a reveal, a small choice with bad consequences. Dialogue is light, voices human, and the image system repeats with purpose — violet light, carapaces, church detritus repurposed into sea altars — so that, by midbook, any mention of a glow or a shell becomes a doorbell you brace for. The cycle structure matters. Because “Leandra’s Story” and “Pandora” act as anchor points, callbacks register as fate rather than Easter eggs, and the book achieves that rare short-story-collection trick where the whole feels heavier than the pile.
Grey is gnawing on replacement and faith. The body horror is not just gross, it is metaphysical: organisms colonize bones like tenants after an evacuation, an elegant way to literalize the fear that identity is a lease and nature keeps the deed. The cult material is sympathetic rather than sneering. People grasp at patterns because entropy is a bully, and if a preacher says the new race of man comes from the sea, well, you can hear the surf from the parking lot. The book is briny and tender, a question more than a thesis: if something smarter, meaner, or simply better adapted is coming, are we obligated to fight it, welcome it, or make sure it learns from our worst habits before it inherits the keys. The next morning I remembered the eel-wound crucifix and felt weirdly protective of my bones.
This is Grey’s most unified book, a capstone to his museum-of-monsters vibe that threads his obsessions into a single, durable rope. It sits neatly beside recent folk-cosmic hybrids while remaining unabashedly in love with the kind of retro adventure furniture that new-weird often pretends it never borrowed.
It is a cohesive, moody walk through one very idiosyncratic underworld where the jokes are kind, the images bite, and the whole adds up to more than a scrapbook, which is exactly what I claimed up top.
Read if you crave linked-weird mythmaking that connects porch lights, pulp paperbacks, and esoteric churches into one subterranean atlas; you can handle gentle humor rubbing elbows with genuine dread and occasional goo; you love the feeling of a monster movie that keeps cutting to an empty hallway until something finally steps in.
Skip if you need clean answers about cosmology, taxonomy, and who built what tunnel when; you hate story cycles and want either a pure novel or totally standalone shorts; you require set-piece gore over slow, sea-salt creep.
January 31, 2026
Gets off to a great start, with a couple of excellent, slightly shivery stories touching on side ideas and implications of the core (so to speak) story here--the one about the kid whose neighbor is warning about the bug apocalypse is great and suggestive, the one about the video store is a hippie/stoner rewrite of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (spiced with Grey's characteristic film-lover vibe), and the one that got reprinted a bunch, which is great highway horror. (There's now an entire genre of rest-stop horror, whose contemporaneity I wonder about--whenever we drove down to DC when I was a kid, those NJ rest stops [the Vince Lombardi one in particular] felt iconic, but it feels like that's a very 1970s/80s bit. We don't do a lot of long drives now, and in Ca. the rest stop isn't really a thing.) All of those touch lightly on his evolving notion of what this whole mythology says and how it works--it's derived from a throwaway HPL line.
The problem after that is that the stories get increasingly invested in working out details of the mythology and filling in cracks, which unfortunately gets less interesting; mystery and suggestion are almost always more engaging than spelling out what's been implied. (I always think of CS Lewis's The Magician's Nephew here: we absolutely do not need to know why there's a very English light pole right inside the entrance to Narnia, or how it got there.) So there's a good deal of narration and filling-in and general spackling, much of which is less fun/engaging/shivery than what came before. The long centerpiece story, told through testimony, gets off to a strong start, but we end up doing more narrative backfilling, which unfortunately gets picked up later.
As always, his story notes are almost worth the price of admission: Grey thinks as much as fan as writer, and it's always a joy to see what he's working with, the literary tropes and obscure movies he wants to reference. The notes on the final entry possibly suggest that there's something deeply, powerfully personal about the fundamental trope of all of these stories; if so, that suggests something more is going on in the conception here. I'll be interested to see if that's actually where he's going.
The problem after that is that the stories get increasingly invested in working out details of the mythology and filling in cracks, which unfortunately gets less interesting; mystery and suggestion are almost always more engaging than spelling out what's been implied. (I always think of CS Lewis's The Magician's Nephew here: we absolutely do not need to know why there's a very English light pole right inside the entrance to Narnia, or how it got there.) So there's a good deal of narration and filling-in and general spackling, much of which is less fun/engaging/shivery than what came before. The long centerpiece story, told through testimony, gets off to a strong start, but we end up doing more narrative backfilling, which unfortunately gets picked up later.
As always, his story notes are almost worth the price of admission: Grey thinks as much as fan as writer, and it's always a joy to see what he's working with, the literary tropes and obscure movies he wants to reference. The notes on the final entry possibly suggest that there's something deeply, powerfully personal about the fundamental trope of all of these stories; if so, that suggests something more is going on in the conception here. I'll be interested to see if that's actually where he's going.
December 7, 2025
I hesitate to call this Grey's finest collection, as some others have. What I would call this recent, themed, anthology containing some reprints and some original work collectively forming Grey's Hollow Earth Cycle is his most thoughtful collection. While I personally enjoy some of his other stories and collections more, they are at most loosely themed collections of his work which contain the possibility of some unintended over-arching themes an narratives. Notes from the Underground is, as far as I know, his first 'cycle' style collection.
Do not be thrown off by the Hollow Earth moniker. As Grey himself tells us, this is not the hollow earth of Burroughs or Verne, Halley, Hutton, or Symmes. This is a much darker, weirder, and more Lovecraftian take on the genre. Those expecting monsters from the skeletal master of monsters will still receive some shadowed or shining examples, but those will take a secondary role to the Dreamland like horror of slippery, transitional spaces and lost memories.
In a way, though dark, I would shy away from categorizing these as horror. While unexplained, and certainly disturbing to our human notions, the ultimate fate of many characters is something the seek, long for, and dream of. While not happy in their endings, one might call them fulfilled. Or as Barker once (sort of) said, when we dream, we dream of being monsters.
Do not be thrown off by the Hollow Earth moniker. As Grey himself tells us, this is not the hollow earth of Burroughs or Verne, Halley, Hutton, or Symmes. This is a much darker, weirder, and more Lovecraftian take on the genre. Those expecting monsters from the skeletal master of monsters will still receive some shadowed or shining examples, but those will take a secondary role to the Dreamland like horror of slippery, transitional spaces and lost memories.
In a way, though dark, I would shy away from categorizing these as horror. While unexplained, and certainly disturbing to our human notions, the ultimate fate of many characters is something the seek, long for, and dream of. While not happy in their endings, one might call them fulfilled. Or as Barker once (sort of) said, when we dream, we dream of being monsters.
October 18, 2025
It’s not a Halloween month without a Orrin Grey book. This collection of Hollow Earth stories is excellent in the way his stories are; I wish the collection was a bit longer. I wanted to spend more time in this horrifying mythology.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews