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Book Review: The Bone Cutters by Renee S. DeCamillis

The Bone Cutters by Renee S. DeCamillis

Eraserhead Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1621052937

Available: Paperback

 

This has been a banner year for introducing stellar new horror writers to the world. Renee S. DeCamillis shows she is one of these with  her novella The Bone Cutters, one of the strangest, but coolest, entries of 2019. Fans of Gwendolyn Kiste or Cody Goodfellow will definitely want to seek this out.

The novella is a wonderful form for horror, giving the reader and author just enough time to grow into the story, fall for the characters, and then leave both with a scar on the soul. DeCamillis’ story touches on elements of the familiar, but makes it her own.

Dory, the main character, wakes up in a mental ward with no idea how she got there, but learns she has been “blue-papered”– committed without consent. In other hands than DeCamillis’, this could have turned out to be just another horror tale in a tired setting, but the story takes a hard left when Dory attends her first group meeting. The people in the group have strange scars signaling that they are  addicts of a new kind. These people are “dusters,” the titular “bone cutters”. who carve into their own– or others’ — bodies, to get high off the dust within. They dig and scrape until they procure enough of the material from the bones to give themselves  a high unknown to other addicts. Because Dory is a “freshie”– a newbie who hasn’t been dusted yet– she becomes their prime target. Dory has nobody to help her until she meets the enigmatic custodian, Tommy, whose past may tie into the patients from whom Dory is trying to escape.

To say more about the plot would give away too much. Just dive in and enjoy.

DeCamillis doesn’t mess around with frills here. Her writing is as razor sharp as the cutting tools the patients use. Not a word is wasted in this lean tale that grabs hold from the get go, and drags the reader through a surreal experience that evokes One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, if written by Clive Barker. The ending arrives way too fast, but it will leave readers jonesing for another hit of this new writer.

A recommended novella to be added to a fine 2019.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

 

Posted on September 13, 2019 by , 1 comment

Book Review: Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin

Wednesday Books, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1250239549

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Sixteen year old Elle and her friends Jenny, Summer, and Mads, are glamorous, vicious, daughters of the ultra-rich whose parents have given them a lot of freedom, When the four girls crash a party for the lacrosse team for the elite prep school, St. Andrews, what starts out as fun becomes a lot less so as the girls are separated and most of the lacrosse team colludes in drugging and raping Elle.

But this is not the story of Elle as either a victim or a survivor. This is the story of how Elle plans to kill off every member of the lacrosse team who had any kind of involvement in orchestrating or participating in her rape, backed by her friends, or “coven”.  As she looks at a photo of the St. Andrews lacrosse team, she spots one boy who was not involved, and decides she’s going to manipulate him into killing his teammates.  Cutting and dyeing her hair, she transfers to St. Andrews to get close to her future victims, and especially, to get close to Mack, the player who didn’t take part, so she can convince him that knocking off his teammates is the right thing to do, and set him up as the fall guy. Even falling in love with him– and she thinks she might be falling in love with him– isn’t enough to take her mind and her heart off vengeance.

Foul and Fair takes its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, positioning Elle’s friends as the three witches, Elle as Lady Macbeth, and Mack as Macbeth. Rather than convincing him to kill out of ambition, though, Elle convinces him he is killing out of righteousness.  Elle’s murderous anger slashes through the book.

Unfortunately, the scenario of entitled, rich, white guys raping a girl at a party without having to face consequences isn’t an unrealistic one, and certainly Elle’s feelings, and the bonds of her friendships, are strong. But the likelihood of the girls getting away with tormenting and setting up the members of the lacrosse team, especially without getting caught, is something the reader really has to buy into, as is the likelihood of Elle convincing a guy she’s known less than a week to kill his best friend.

Elle is not a sympathetic character (neither is Lady Macbeth, to be fair) although we get to see a few heroic moments in flashbacks to the beginnings of the four girls’ friendships, like her defense of Mads, a trans girl, on the day Mads outed herself at school (Mads is a great character who doesn’t get enough time, and Capin writes her wonderfully). Whatever else they are, Elle and her “coven” have each other’s backs. These four girls, and the way they’re described, although poetic, reveals that they are a pretty terrifying bunch. I’m doubtful that this will appeal to boys, even though it does a pretty good job of laying out the complicity of even those who aren’t directly involved, and they’re the ones who need to see that. But readers looking for a revenge fantasy with sharp teeth won’t be disappointed. Recommended.

Contains: flashbacks to rape, sexual assault, abusive behaviors, bullying, transphobic bullying, brief depictions of suicide, substance abuse, cursing, violence, gore, murder.

Posted on September 3, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Not Even Bones (Market of Monsters #1) by Rebecca Schaeffer

Not Even Bones  by Rebecca Schaeffer

HMH Books for Young Readers, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1328863546

Available: Hardcover, paperback, and Kindle edition

 

If you are planning to start this book, make sure you have plenty of time to finish it, because if you put it down, unless you have a very strong stomach, you may find it difficult to pick it up again. I have addressed content issues within this review, but please see the content warning underneath, as it includes items suggested by the author. 

Not Even Bones is a YA novel set in Peru that takes place in a world teeming with “unnatural creatures.” Some of these, like vampires, are dangerous. Others simply have unusual abilities. While there is an organization, INHUP, tasked with protecting harmless unnaturals, it isn’t effective at policing the black market in unnaturals’ body parts. Nita’s mother hunts and kills unnaturals, and brings them to Nita for dissection and packaging. Nita loves dissection, so she tries not to think about who the dead bodies might have been when they were alive, but one day her mother brings home a living unnatural whose parts will sell better if they’re fresh, and Nita can’t deal with cutting pieces of a living person, so she sets him free. Shortly after, Nita, who has an unnatural ability to heal herself, is kidnapped for sale on the black market herself  and imprisoned in an isolated market on the Amazon in the midst of the jungle. Believing her mother has sold her, Nita decides she must rely on her own resourcefulness to escape, something she becomes even more certain of when she realizes her kidnapper employs a zannie, an unnatural who feeds off the pain of others and is willing to torture them to get his meal. Even a zannie has his limits, though, and Nita and the zannie, Kovit, team up to escape from the market.

Schaeffer does not pull her punches in this book. There is no question that the main (and most of the secondary) characters have done terrible things, unapologetically, and Schaeffer has Kovit explicitly make this point:

“I like it better when people remember who I am. The only thing I hate more than being demonized is when people actively ignore what I do or try to make excuses for it… When they try to make me sympathetic, moralize all the decisions that aren’t moral.”

Nita and Kovit are desperate people, and in the course of the story Nita crosses moral lines she didn’t even know she had, to the point that Kovit warns her that the only thing keeping them from becoming true monsters is setting limits, however arbitary, and sticking to them no matter what.  The gore, gruesomeness, torture, and especially cannibalism was difficult for me to handle (although much is only implied, what we do see is more than enough, and cannibalism of any kind is usually a deal-breaker for me). I can’t recommend it generally to teens, unless they have a very strong stomach and a sophisticated understanding of morality, because in spite of their monstrous actions, their often selfish motivations, and this explicit reminder that they are not sympathetic characters, Schaeffer still managed to have me rooting for Nita and Kovit. They are victimizers, but they’re also victims of both biology and circumstance.

Schaeffer’s imagination is incredible, her world-building is fantastic, and the characters she takes time to develop fully are many-faceted and complex. I can’t think of too many horror novels set in South America, but it was a great choice for this book. Another unusual choice, especially because the book is set in South America, is that Kovit is Thai, and while it isn’t actually necessary to go into this detail to move the story along, this background does come up in an explanation of his origin as an unnatural specific to Thailand, how colonialism has affected the perception of “zannies”, his family, and how he ended up in this particular situation. I haven’t seen many Thai characters in YA fiction, so this was kind of neat to see.

This is both a physically and emotionally gut-wrenching book, both hard to put down and hard to pick back up, but the cliffhanger ending and memorable characters ensure that, despite the difficulty I had with the body horror (especially the dissections and the cannibalism) in this book, I will be looking out for the sequel, Only Ashes Remain, out soon.

 

Contains: Gore, violence, sadism, death, mutilation, dissections, body horror, cannibalism, torture, dismemberment, mention of suicide, mention of animal abuse.

 

Posted on August 23, 2019 by , Reply
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