Stranded in Quettopolis, the capital of Bakhtinstan, Cuffe spends her days surviving the destabilized city, distributing her writing through the ancient Forest, and recollecting her last job as a ‘corporate orator’. An archivist is on her way to steal Cuffe’s writing. A writer is hiding out, with the papers they stole from the archivist. A murderer is in pursuit. The disregarded Forest is re-asserting itself.

The Mothman Institute’s mission is to protect endangered moths, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the Institute’s ‘Players’, and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. A senior Player, Caius, recruited Cuffe to create the rhetoric to underpin this new corporate vision. Cuffe, contemptuously confident, is disturbed by the oddnesses of the Institute – the punitive process with its absent defendant, the quarterly Hunt, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry. Then the Institute gets the shocking news that a breeding pair of a rare moth, thought to be extinct, has been discovered in a country in the middle of a military coup. The Institute in turn is riven by competing ambitions: the Mothmen trying to save the moths, the Players trying to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one – not even Caius – has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement…

Under the influence of Beckett, O’Brien and Kafka, Hollowmen deploys disjunctive temporalities, narrative shifts, and intertextual polyphony to create an irreal depiction of a psychotic corporation and the aftermath of a seismic shift from the margins towards the centre.