How and Why: Rarity from the Hollow by Robert Eggleton

How and Why: Rarity from the Hollow

by Robert Eggleton

I’m a retired children’s psychotherapist and have worked in the field of children’s advocacy in an impoverished U.S. state, West Virginia, for over forty years. Rarity from the Hollow is my debut novel. Although I’d dreamed of becoming a famous author since early adolescence, most of my writing has been nonfiction within my field. In 2002, I accepted a job as a children’s psychotherapist for an intensive day treatment program at our local mental health center. Many of the kids in the program had been abused, some sexually. Part of my job was to facilitate group therapy sessions.

One day in 2006, during a group therapy session, I was sitting around a table used for written therapeutic exercises, and a little girl with stringy, brown hair sat a few feet away. Instead of just disclosing the horrors of her abuse at the hands of the meanest daddy on Earth, she also spoke of her hopes and dreams for the future: finding a permanent and loving family that would protect her.

Over the years, I’d met hundreds of kids who had been traumatized by child maltreatment, but this girl was different. Her resilience was inspiring to everyone that she interacted with, kids and staff alike. She got me thinking again about my own hopes and dreams of writing fiction. My protagonist was born that day – an empowered victim who takes on the evils of the universe: Lacy Dawn. I began to write fiction in the evenings and sometimes went to work the next day without enough sleep. Every time that I would feel discouraged, when I felt like giving up, I would imagine Lacy Dawn speaking honestly about the barriers that she faced in pursuit of her dream of finding loving home.

During my career, many emotionally charged situations have tugged my heart strings so hard that child welfare became more than my job, more than a cause. It became a calling. Rarity from the Hollow fictionalized some of my true-life experiences and includes elements of poverty, domestic violence, child maltreatment, substance abuse and mental health problems. I wrote what I know best. My characters are more real than not, even though the backdrop of the story is science fiction.

I modeled the flow of the story after a mental health treatment episode involving a traumatized child: harsh and difficult to read scenes in the beginning of the story are similar to how, in treatment, therapeutic relationships must first be established before very difficult disclosures are made; cathartic and more relaxed scenes in middle chapters as detailed disclosures are less painful; and, increasingly satiric and comical toward the end through an understanding that it is “silly” to live in the past, that demons, no matter how scary, can be evicted, and that nothing controls our lives more so than the decisions that we make ourselves.

I know that it sounds weird, but I imagined victims benefiting from having read a science fiction story. Maybe I was trying to rationalize a balance between these two competing interests – writing fiction and my interest in child welfare. Even though I’d paid into the U.S. Social Security fund for over fifty-two years, I felt a little guilty even thinking about retirement.


In hindsight, maybe my idea that persons who had experienced childhood maltreatment could benefit from reading Rarity from the Hollow wasn’t so off-base after all. Nine book reviewers have privately disclosed to me that they were survivors of childhood maltreatment, and that they had benefited having read the story. A couple of book reviewers publicly disclosed:




“…As a rape survivor… found myself relating easily to Lacy Dawn… style of writing which I would describe as beautifully honest. Rarity from the Hollow is different from anything I have ever read, and in today’s world of cookie-cutter cloned books, that’s pretty refreshing…taking you on a wild ride you won’t soon forget….” 


“…a hillbilly version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, only instead of the earth being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, Lacy Dawn must…The author has managed to do what I would have thought impossible; taken serious subjects like poverty, ignorance, abuse, and written about them with tongue-in-cheek humor without trivializing them…Eggleton sucks you into the Hollow, dunks you in the creek, rolls you in the mud, and splays you in the sun to dry off. Tucked between the folds of humor are some profound observations on human nature and modern society that you have to read to appreciate…it’s a funny book that most sci-fi fans will thoroughly enjoy.”

http://awesomeindies.net/ai-approved-review-of-rarity-from-the-holly-by-robert-eggleton/ 


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