book rec
Today I got my copy of Sarah Monette's The Bone Key from amazon.com, and devoured it all in about five hours.
The Bone Key is a collection of interrelated short stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, a museum curator in early twentieth-century New England. In the first story, Booth unwillingly gets drawn into some very bad magic, and after that, the supernatural just keeps happening to him, much as he wishes it would stop.
Booth is a remarkable creation. He's nothing like the typical fantasy hero--he's shy, timid, repressed, terribly lonely, and deeply troubled. In the introduction, Monette describes Booth as a semi-autobiographical character who sprang from her shy and awkward childhood. I suspect I'm not the only reader who'll feel a pang of recognition, either.
Booth is also gay, which, given his era and his background, only makes him lonelier. "Elegy for a Demon Lover," in which Booth finds love (but, as the title indicates, with a catch) is the saddest thing I've read in a long time.
The Booth stories are utterly unlike Monette's rather baroque fantasy world in Melusine and its sequels. Instead, they're in the mode of the uncanny, which both mirrors the banal, everyday world and erupts terrifyingly into it. Monette's prose is a model of chaste decorum (she cites Lovecraft as an influence, but thanksfully she doesn't imitate his style), and the horror is achieved without gore or shock-effects.
I recommend this book very, very highly.
*****
The Bone Key is a collection of interrelated short stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, a museum curator in early twentieth-century New England. In the first story, Booth unwillingly gets drawn into some very bad magic, and after that, the supernatural just keeps happening to him, much as he wishes it would stop.
Booth is a remarkable creation. He's nothing like the typical fantasy hero--he's shy, timid, repressed, terribly lonely, and deeply troubled. In the introduction, Monette describes Booth as a semi-autobiographical character who sprang from her shy and awkward childhood. I suspect I'm not the only reader who'll feel a pang of recognition, either.
Booth is also gay, which, given his era and his background, only makes him lonelier. "Elegy for a Demon Lover," in which Booth finds love (but, as the title indicates, with a catch) is the saddest thing I've read in a long time.
The Booth stories are utterly unlike Monette's rather baroque fantasy world in Melusine and its sequels. Instead, they're in the mode of the uncanny, which both mirrors the banal, everyday world and erupts terrifyingly into it. Monette's prose is a model of chaste decorum (she cites Lovecraft as an influence, but thanksfully she doesn't imitate his style), and the horror is achieved without gore or shock-effects.
I recommend this book very, very highly.
*****