Tuesday, March 11, 2025

The Bone Man, by Frederic S. Durbin

The Bone Man is a novelette from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007, here published as a chapbook with illustrations by Daniel Williams. Durbin's story begins familiarly: a traveler stumbles upon some sort of local festival in an unnamed Midwestern town. Here the stranger is a hit man, Conlin, who has just finished a job. He comes to a town on Halloween that is preparing for an annual parade for The Bone Man, an animate skeleton who can only be seen by some people. Conlin is intrigued, and stays for the festival. Durbin notes in a six-page Afterword that the town takes some aspects from Sauk City, Wisconsin, the home of his first publisher, Arkham House, who released his novel Dragonfly in 1999. Durbin has published two other books, a novel A Green and Ancient Light in 2016; and a serial from Cricket Magazine  as The Star Shard in 2012. The Bone Man is well-written and stylistically appealing, and because of this I ordered copies of all three of Durbin's books. The illustrations by Daniel Williams are symbolic rather than representative of the plot, but they complement it nicely.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

The Woman Who Fell to Earth, by R.B. Russell

The ingredients used to make this novel promise something delectable. There is a deceased and disreputable writer,  Cyril Heldman, who wrote weird and occultish tales and who died under very strange circumstances. His literary executor, Catherine Richards, whose house is crammed full of books, papers, newspapers, herself dies bizarrely in the first chapter: by falling from the sky onto the nearby roof of her longtime friend Tanya Sewell, who is also Catherine's niece, after meeting and marrying Tanya's widowed uncle years earlier. Tanya inherits Catherine's house, which she had known in childhood, and becomes involved in several mysteries, particularly to do with an online forum devoted to Heldman that has its usual share of cranks and trolls. Add to this an unscrupulous book dealer and a collector of occult artifacts, bent on finding Heldman's relic called the Sixtystone (lifted from one of Arthur Machen's tales), which was the subject of one of Heldman's novels, and you have the basics of an intriguing literary weird tale. The writing, too, is fine, but somewhere along the line, the characters begin to act in ways that don't fit with how they were established, and they make decisions that move the plot forward at the expense of literary belief; and the workings of the Sixtystone, never really set forth, are variable enough to belie concrete aspects of the plot and leave important points (like the methodology of strange deaths) without any context. The result is somewhat unsatisfying, but it is a mostly pleasant read to reach the end of the novel. 

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Barrowbeck, by Andrew Michael Hurley

Novelist Andrew Michael Hurley has published what is basically a thirteen story collection, centered around a fictional border town between Yorkshire and Lancashire called Barrowbeck. This provides a thin skein that connects the stories, and the hint that the setting is something rather more significant enters into only a few of the tales. The first is set in the distant past, while the final story is set in 2041 in a post-climate crisis. These bookends turn out to be the best in the book, while the rest are various kinds of oddities. A baby is grown from a plant by a kind of witch for a childless couple. Disadvantaged children are bussed into the town for a day to enjoy life before being taken back to their grim existence--this inspires one local boy to an unusual solution. A domestic story of two close sisters turns very cryptic at the end when a B&B guest returns to find them cocooned in a back room. Hurley plays with different styles, and with different types of story, but most feel fragmentary and as a whole the collection remains less than satisfactory, though not without some high points.