"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"--
HAMMERS ON BONE is a story about justice and protection for a kid who asked the detective for help, and the strange path to get there. I love the syllabic density in this story. The MC speaks like a noir detective, all “skirts” and “dames”, cigarette smoke and “look, sister”, but without talking down about it. This is a style which is filled with a bunch of words that I'm pretty sure aren't actually slurs but are at the edge of what one can say while being polite, and would get very strange looks either way. The book is canonically set in the 21st century, making a strange but very cool mix of cultural touchstones. The full effect is one of stepping knowingly into an uncomfortable linguistic space, just as many of the characters are viscerally uncomfortable in their skin due to spores, tentacles, or growing eyes. Everything builds that …
HAMMERS ON BONE is a story about justice and protection for a kid who asked the detective for help, and the strange path to get there. I love the syllabic density in this story. The MC speaks like a noir detective, all “skirts” and “dames”, cigarette smoke and “look, sister”, but without talking down about it. This is a style which is filled with a bunch of words that I'm pretty sure aren't actually slurs but are at the edge of what one can say while being polite, and would get very strange looks either way. The book is canonically set in the 21st century, making a strange but very cool mix of cultural touchstones. The full effect is one of stepping knowingly into an uncomfortable linguistic space, just as many of the characters are viscerally uncomfortable in their skin due to spores, tentacles, or growing eyes. Everything builds that uncanny feeling to center the reader in the MC's head without taking them out of the modern world. Well worth reading, I enjoyed this one!
"I want you to kill my stepdad." I kick my feet off my desk and lean forward, rucking my brow. "Say that again, kid?" Usually, it's dames trussed up in whalebone and lace that come slinking through my door. Or, as is more often the case these days, femmes fatales in Jimmy Choos and Armani knockoffs. The pipsqueak in my office is new, and I'm not sure I like his brand of new. He's young, maybe a rawboned eleven, but he has the stare of someone three times his age and something twice as dangerous.
When the literal opening lines of the book have me grinning in excitement like they did, I knew I didn't stand a chance at putting this book down. What follows is a short but concise story in the form of a deluge of hard-boiled/noir tropes and classic Lovecraftian references. This really was just a satisfying …
"I want you to kill my stepdad." I kick my feet off my desk and lean forward, rucking my brow. "Say that again, kid?" Usually, it's dames trussed up in whalebone and lace that come slinking through my door. Or, as is more often the case these days, femmes fatales in Jimmy Choos and Armani knockoffs. The pipsqueak in my office is new, and I'm not sure I like his brand of new. He's young, maybe a rawboned eleven, but he has the stare of someone three times his age and something twice as dangerous.
When the literal opening lines of the book have me grinning in excitement like they did, I knew I didn't stand a chance at putting this book down. What follows is a short but concise story in the form of a deluge of hard-boiled/noir tropes and classic Lovecraftian references. This really was just a satisfying marriage of two distinct genres that came from a place of appreciation instead of parody. If I could only use two words to sum this book up, they'd be "efficient" and "fun".
"Efficient," because there really isn't a wasted scene or sentence really. It's just pedal-to-the-floor right from the start, but not in a way that's exhausting. A tight cast that doesn't overstay it's welcome, a setup, a twist, a betrayal, and a resolution all in just about a hundred pages is damned impressive if you ask me.
And "fun" because it was just that. Content notwithstanding of course; there are mentions of child abuse, murder, and "Jesus Christ that's messed up"-body horror, but they're not the point of the scenes they're present in. No, I mean fun in the sense that we get to watch our not-entirely-human-but-don't-worry-about-it protagonist use his skills to learn what he can before even deciding to take the job, and those information-gathering scenes have an amusing supernatural twist to them. If even just your rising action setup scenes are enjoyable, you're doing something right.
Also I'm just a sucker for these kinds of lines:
The street is getting dark, the pavement tiger-striped by halogen. It wears the fog like a dame's best scarf, slightly jaunty, with an edge of challenge.
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.
chef's kiss If a 500 page, life-changing novel is a full course meal, then this book was a bag of chips. And sometimes you just want a bag of chips.
