“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she says at last, slow, guarded.
“Them?”
Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw
SERIES: Persons Non Grata #1
LENGTH: 110 pages
GENRES: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Fiction
PUBLISHER: Tor.com
RELEASE DATE: 11 October 2016
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He’s been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid’s stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.
He’s also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he’s hunted gods and demons, and broken them in his teeth.
As Persons investigates the horrible McKinsey, he realizes that he carries something far darker. He’s infected with an alien presence, and he’s spreading that monstrosity far and wide. Luckily Persons is no stranger to the occult, being an ancient and magical intelligence himself. The question is whether the private dick can take down the abusive stepdad without releasing the holds on his own horrifying potential.
My Review
You learn things in this line of work. Like how to read heartbeats. Any gumshoe can tell when a darb’s lying, but it takes a special class of sharper to differentiate between two truths.
Well, I guess it was an inevitable eventuality, though I hoped it wouldn’t have come this early in the year. My first two star rating. Or, two and a quarter star, technically.
I had hope for Hammers on Bone. It was Lovecraftian horror inspired and it was pretty short, being a novella and all. But I didn’t like it.
Part of this was, unfortunately, probably because this was a novella. Even though I’ve enjoyed most of the shorter novels that I’ve read – specifically the Murderbot Diaries. But I have noticed a problem with smaller stories like this, and with this book being a mystery, it was a particular problem here.
The author said that they actually lengthened the novella compared to its initial drafts because they thought that it needed more room to breathe. Well, sorry but there still wasn’t enough room for the book to breathe. The MC jumps to conclusions that end up being correct kind of out of nowhere, though I guess I should have figured it out sooner, considering there are a limited number of characters and places. But this is a mystery book, you should still figure out a way to find time and set your mystery and conclusions up!! It made it very irritating to read.
I also didn’t like any of the characters, not even the protagonist. Yeah, I know it’s a novella, but you can still create compelling characters <150 pages – if you’re a good writer. And yeah, even though I didn’t care for any of the cast, I found the side characters more interesting than the MC. Which shouldn’t have happened given that the protagonist was some sort of eldritch horror. Like, how do you fail to make that your most interesting character?!?
The way that the dialogue was written annoyed me. As was the way the narrative – I didn’t like the way the first person perspective was written. Some of the language the author used came across as either awkward or mismatched. I know that I’m not British and the book and author were, but I’ve read other books by British authors where the dialogue came across as natural and the narrative wasn’t… weird, I guess. I just didn’t like it, okay?
Anyway, I don’t have anything else to say about Hammers on Bone. I guess if you like and know a lot about Lovecraftian horror than you might like it; you’ll probably enjoy it more than me – I’m not particularly knowledgeable about Lovecraft stuff (but I’ve also enjoyed other Lovecraft stuff that isn’t this, so who knows).
So yeah, as always, thank you to everyone so much for reading and I hope that you have an awesome day/night!
See ya ~Mar
Some of the Writing That I Kind of Liked
“How do you know the sky’s blue? It’s like that. Like the knowledge that comes with breathing, with knowing when you’re hungry, when you’re cold. Exactly like that.”
You know how they say you never forget how to ride a bike? Magic’s like that. Deeper, even. The knowledge of it inks itself on the inside of your bones, as does the practice, the methodology of execution. You can’t unlearn it any more than you can unlearn the symbiosis of ventricle and aorta.
Night comes. Real night. Not just the chronological byproduct of Earth pirouetting around the sun, but a blackness that shoves the lizard brain nose first into the dirt and hisses for caution.
The noise becomes a whisper, a hiss, a celebration, a roar, a black surf breaking on the glaciers of an old, decaying world. It sutures itself into syllables, strings of sounds that could almost be called words if you’re feeling generous.