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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

Book Review: What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine

What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine

Harper, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062684134

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

What Should Be Wild is a flawed, if gorgeously written dark fairytale. Julia Fine has outdone herself in establishing a disturbing, unwieldy, and wild Gothic setting for her story of  Maisie, a girl born with the power of life and death in her touch. The women of the Blakely family are believed to be under a curse: many of them have terrible stories that led them into the dark wood behind the family home, Urizon, never to be seen again. The story alternates between the present day, with Maisie narrating, and third-person narratives about the other Blakely women who disappeared, who are now trapped in a timeless dimension in the wood where things are just starting to change.

Not without reason, Maisie has been kept in isolation from the rest of the world by her anthropologist father and the family housekeeper. Unable to touch without killing, she is starved for affection, and has to work to suppress her urges to touch the things and people around her, following rules strictly enforced by her father. Her solace is in stories, especially local history and customs, folklore, and fairytales. These stories, and the structure imposed on her by her father, are the only patterns she has for connecting to the world around her– in short, she is naive, sheltered, and unable to imagine people who don’t follow the patterns of the narratives she knows.  When she discovers the family housekeeper’s death and runs away to process it, she discovers on her return that her father has disappeared to search for her. Matthew, the housekeeper’s nephew, steps in to accompany her when she decides to search for him. They then encounter Rafe, who claims to be a colleague of her father’s also looking for him– that both he and her father have been searching for a way to enter the wild wood where the Blakely women are trapped. Up to the point that Maisie encounters Rafe, her first-person narration is really interesting. It gets us inside her head, as an unusual child with perceptions that are far different than the norm. At that point, Maisie’s naivete becomes more and more frustrating, as it becomes quickly obvious what the characters’ motivations are, and they become pretty one-dimensional for most of the journey.

When the search takes the three of them to the city, both men disappear from the picture, and Maisie is left in a horrific situation. She is drugged and trapped, without means of escape, while a man drains her of blood for a mysterious purpose, and after several weeks he realizes that her power can be used to his financial benefit, as when she “kills” an animal, it enters stasis rather than decaying. The terrifying months of being drained and having angry animals released into the room she’s locked in are horrific to read about and jarring compared to the rest of the book, but Maisie’s lack of agency and desperation, and her connection to the wood behind Urizon, start to affect the actions and events occurring among the Blakely women and the growth of the wood.

The stories of each of the Blakely women trapped in the wood, written in third person, are interspersed throughout Maisie’s story. This helps make them a little more real: otherwise they are really just a group of bodies and names. Each woman or girl in the wood in some way fell outside the narrative of conventional womanhood: too ill, too unattractive, too stubborn, too disobedient, too old, too foreign, too promiscuous. Yet, falling outside the narrative of conventional womanhood doesn’t mean they don’t have their own stories, although the stories have become more of tales cautioning people against entering the wood, than local history connected to any particular name. Maisie, too, has her own story connected to the woods, and it starts out much like a quest narrative– but the actual ending doesn’t require the kind of challenge I had expected and is rather anticlimactic.

I had some frustrations with the way characters were portrayed in this book. With its strong connection to a fairy-tale style of writing, I wasn’t expecting all fully developed characters, especially in the woods and the stories of the Blakely women, since most fairy tale characters are stand-ins for archetypes. But this is a novel, not a fairytale, and a little more depth and consistency with the characters of Matthew, Rafe, and Peter would have been appreciated. The book also had some confusing moments and left many unanswered questions. For instance, Maisie’s dog and her relationship with him was very odd, and the overprotective Matthew suddenly leaving Maisie when he knew she was vulnerable was surprising. The actions of the unknown girl in the forest were baffling.

This book has been described as a feminist fairytale, and it certainly does hit you over the head with its repeated focus on women’s lack of agency and the way they have been forced to suppress their desires in favor of fitting a pre-existing narrative of femininity. That is a strong and important message. But I really felt the lack of any  fully (or even mostly) supportive male characters was a disservice. Every single man in this book was trying to control some woman’s body or actions, if not physically, than by patronizing, threatening, or manipulating them. This was true even for Matthew, who was the most sympathetic male character. Given the treatment of all the women in this book, the curse of the Blakely women appears to be not that they were so desperate to escape the men victimizing them that they’d rather spend eternity in the wood but that hundreds of years later, while women might have evolved, men’s treatment of them pretty much hadn’t changed at all. While the fairytale here appears to have a happy ending for Maisie, the story of the women in the wood, and the world, is ongoing.

Despite any issues I have with it, this is an unusual, compelling, and memorable story, with lush and beautiful writing. It doesn’t move quickly, but you will find yourself lost inside Fine’s dark, wild, wood, and in her tale, if you care to enter. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: body horror, cannibalism, animal cruelty, murder, torture.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: What Should Be Wild is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards. 

Posted on May 10, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Dark and Distant Voices by Tim Waggoner


Dark and Distant Voices by Tim Waggoner

Nightscape Press, 2018

ISBN: 9781938644252

Available: Kindle, Paperback

Dark and Distant Voices is a Stoker-nominated collection from Tim Waggoner. This collection presents 19 blood-curdling tales of creepiness, which will haunt your dreams. The motif which pushes the stories along is the idea that there exist dark voices you can’t quite figure out where they’re speaking from, telling you bone chilling truths.

Standout stories include “Blood and Bone”, which gives us a particularly great monster tale;  “Doozer Is a Happy Cancer”, a trippy story which concerns a homeless man who lives in a tent city with a population that keeps shrinking for some terrible, dark reason; and “Sky-Watching”, which blends events from the writer’s life with a dark and grim tale that brings us some really dark and blood-curdling horror.

Dark and Distant Voices will keep you awake at night, as you wonder if any of these monsters Waggoner tells us about lie in wait for you. Recommended for adults. It’s far too grim, violent, and terrifying for any child.

 

Reviewed by Ben Franz

 

Editor’s note: Dark and Distant Voices is a nominee on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. 

Posted on May 3, 2019 by , Reply
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