House of Hollow

White carrion flowers are primarily a symbol of deception, but also mirror the Hollow sisters themselves. Though the flowers are beautiful, they smell of “rotting flesh to attract flies and bugs” (135). Iris first sees the “death flowers” growing from a picture of Grey, and then they reappear on the corpse in Grey’s apartment, around freestanding doors, and in the Halfway house where the original Hollow girls are buried. The flowers use their beauty to lure prey, just as the Hollow sisters’ skin can manipulate others through contact. Grey weaponizes her beauty the most out of the sisters, a carrion flower in human form who draws attention and kills in service of her loved ones.

The carrion flowers also symbolize the Hollow sisters’ identities as changelings. Agnes analogizes Iris’s background by using the carrion flower: “You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath” (200). Not just Grey hides a dark secret: All three sisters are dangerous creatures who wear the skin of murdered girls (though Iris and Vivi are ignorant of the truth). The freestanding doors are always covered in carrion flowers, as though a part of the half-dead Halfway seeps into the living world, just as the Hollow sisters once belonged to the Halfway but deceived the doors in order to live a second life.