Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

by

Ransom Riggs

Hollowgast Term Analysis

Hollowgast are former peculiars who tried to use time loops to live forever. Their attempt caused a massive explosion and left them to live in a state of “damnation”—while they can live for thousands of years, they have rotting skin and tentacles for tongues, and they constantly desire the flesh of peculiars. Miss Peregrine theorizes that they reversed their aging so severely that they went back to a time before they had souls, essentially turning themselves into devils. Most peculiars can only see hollowgast shadows, except when the hollowgast are eating (which is why hollowgast hunt mostly at night). Jacob and his grandfather have the ability to see them all the time, however, which is why other peculiars often rely on them for protection. When a hollowgast eats enough peculiars, it becomes a wight.

Hollowgast Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below are all either spoken by Hollowgast or refer to Hollowgast. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I’d been lied to. I couldn’t understand why he’d made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

I’m crouched in the corner of my grandfather’s bedroom, amber dusk-light retreating from the windows, pointing a pink plastic BB rifle at the door. An enormous glowing vending machine looms where the bed should be, filled not with candy but rows of razor-sharp tactical knives and armor-piercing pistols. My grandfather’s there in an old British army uniform, feeding the machine dollar bills, but it takes a lot to buy a gun and we’re running out of time. Finally, a .45 spins toward the glass, but before it falls it gets stuck. He swears in Yiddish, kicks the machine, then kneels down and reaches inside to try and grab it, but his arm gets caught. That’s when they come, their long black tongues slithering up the windows, looking for a way in. I point the BB gun at them and pull the trigger, but nothing happens.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Dr. Golan/The Birder
Page Number: 44-45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—that was magical. So I couldn’t believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I couldn’t stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad, and now I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn’t fight because they were all dead, beyond killing or punishing or any kind of reckoning. At least my grandfather had been able to join the army and go fight them. What could I do?

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

She turned serious. “They don’t know where to find us. That and they can’t enter loops. So we’re safe on the island—but we can’t leave.”

“But Victor did.”

She nodded sadly. “He said he was going mad here. Said he couldn’t stand it any longer. Poor Bronwyn. My Abe left, too, but at least he wasn’t murdered by hollows.”

I forced myself to look at her. “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this…”

“What? Oh no.”

“They convinced me it was wild animals. But if what you’re saying is true, my grandfather was murdered by them, too. The first and only time I saw one was the night he died.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Bronwyn, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 247-248
Explanation and Analysis:

I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 255
Explanation and Analysis:

Some years ago, around the turn of the last century, a splinter faction emerged among our people—a coterie of disaffected peculiars with dangerous ideas. They believed they had discovered a method by which the function of time loops could be perverted to confer upon the user a kind of immortality; not merely the suspension of aging, but the reversal of it. They spoke of eternal youth enjoyed outside the confines of loops, of jumping back and forth from future to past with impunity, suffering none of the ill effects that have always prevented such recklessness—in other words, of mastering time without being mastered by death.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 258-259
Explanation and Analysis:

Others might call the state of being they subsequently assumed a kind of living damnation. Weeks later there began a series of attacks upon peculiars by awful creatures who, apart from their shadows, could not be seen except by peculiars like yourself—our very first clashes with the hollowgast. It was some time before we realized that these tentacle-mawed abominations were in fact our wayward brothers, crawled from the smoking crater left behind by their experiment. Rather than becoming gods, they had transformed themselves into devils.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman, Dr. Golan/The Birder, Enoch
Page Number: 259-260
Explanation and Analysis:

I wanted to explain everything, and for him to tell me he understood and offer some tidbit of parental advice. I wanted, in that moment, for everything to go back to the way it had been before we came here; before I ever found that letter from Miss Peregrine, back when I was just a sort-of-normal messed-up rich kid in the suburbs. Instead, I sat next to my dad for awhile and talked about nothing, and I tried to remember what my life had been like in that unfathomably distant era that was four weeks ago, or imagine what it might be like four weeks from now—but I couldn’t. Eventually we ran out of nothing to talk about, and I excused myself and went upstairs to be alone.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 268
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Emma stood up and shut the door. “She won’t kill us,” she said, “those things will. And if they don’t, living like this might just be worse than dying. The Bird’s got us cooped up so tight we can hardly breathe, and all because she doesn’t have the spleen to face whatever’s out there!”

Related Characters: Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Jacob Portman, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:

I killed it, I thought. I really killed it. All the time I’d spent being afraid, I never dreamed I could actually kill one!

It made me feel powerful. Now I could defend myself. I knew I’d never be as strong as my grandfather, but I wasn’t a gutless weakling, either. I could kill them.

I tested out the words. “It’s dead. I killed it.”

I laughed. Emma hugged me, pressing her cheek against mine. “I know he would’ve been proud of you,” she said.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Malthus
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

“Is this what you want?” Golan shouted. “Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I’ll throw them over the side!”

“Not if I shoot you in the head!”

He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbrynes their lives.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Dr. Golan/The Birder (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Page Number: 324
Explanation and Analysis:
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Hollowgast Term Timeline in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The timeline below shows where the term Hollowgast appears in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...protect his people—both Jews and peculiars—and afterward he went to America because it had few “hollowgast” (monsters) at the time. Many peculiars moved to America and passed as common, which Abe... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...exist during a time before their souls or hearts existed—which is why they are called “hollowgast.” They achieved immortality but now have a life of “constant physical torment,” longing to feed... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...peculiar abilities, but they pass for human, so they can act as spies for the hollows. Their goal is to kill all the peculiars and allow the hollows to become wights.... (full context)
Chapter 10
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...on the children. Miss Avocet is also still there, and the children theorize why the hollows are trying to capture ymbrynes. But being confined to the house makes them apathetic and... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...Peregrine all that has happened in the town. Miss Peregrine is shocked, explaining that if hollows can’t eat peculiars, they’ll start to prey on common people instead, which is likely what... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...long, she’ll age very rapidly. But she wants to fight against the wights and the hollows—she explains that “living like this might just be worse than dying.” She tells the other... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Millard protests, saying that they have no idea how to find the wights or the hollows—even though Jacob can see them, he doesn’t necessarily know where to find them. Enoch then... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...care of the man. Martin spouts some poetry, and Jacob realizes that Martin mistook a hollowgast for the museum corpse, as Miss Peregrine told Jacob that hollows become visible when they’re... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
...peculiars and Jacob can live freely and not worry about being tracked down by a hollow. Jacob can see the appeal in the idea, but he knows he could never betray... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...into the center of the room. Jacob is the only one that can see the hollow, but the others see its shadow on the wall. Jacob knows it’s just toying with... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Jacob says that the hollow is to the left, so they have to keep to the right and try for... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...Jacob and Emma like they planned, and they duck into a nearby shack, hoping the hollow is too stupid to follow them. Jacob realizes when he enters it that it’s the... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...Just as they’re about to kiss, Malthus circles back and comes through the shack. The hollow tears sheep after sheep apart, making its way towards Jacob and Emma as the other... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...with the shears, but to no avail. He turns around as he’s pulled towards the hollow and stabs into the hollow’s eye sockets, causing it to thrash and bleed a dark,... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...Enoch, and Hugh greet them, relieved. Jacob and Emma explain happily that they killed the hollow, while Hugh reveals that Dr. Golan kidnapped Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet by threatening to... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
Jacob asks what Golan wants with the ymbrynes, and Golan explains that the hollows need all the ymbrynes working together to get their experiment right and live forever. Jacob... (full context)
Chapter 11
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...Enoch thinks it’s too risky. But Emma insists that if they stay, the wights and hollows will simply return. Emma suggests that finding another ymbryne can help them fix their loop,... (full context)