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.
