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 … 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 new novella from rising author Cassandra Khaw.
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Book Content Warning: Spousal and child abuse • assault
Cassandra Khaw is an author who frequently gets recommended to me, but for one reason or another, I still haven’t read her work.
I fixed that today, with Tor offering a digital copy of ‘Hammers On Bone.’ The synopsis was intriguing and the cover was stunning – consider me hooked.
I was excited to dive in and see what type of Lovecraftian horror Khaw was serving up and boy was it ever served.
What I liked: The story follows private investigator John Persons who is hired by a ten-year-old boy to kill his stepdad. He tells Persons that his stepdad is actually a monster and Persons knows this to be true.
From there we get a rollicking tale as Persons tracks down the stepdad and we discover that not everything we see is what it is. We get some fantastic creepy moments, really dark sections and of course a healthy splattering of tentacles and creatures.
I really loved the fast-paced story and we move around the streets with ease, each new place visited offering up more and more regarding the story but also the overarching mythos that is at the heart of the hunt. The character of Abel was really well done and the familial relationship aspect was executed perfectly.
The ending was fantastic and with this being labelled book one following Persons, I’d be excited to see what we discover in future releases.
What I didn’t like: I really wasn’t a fan of Persons dialogue and 50’s jargon. I get that it had to do with his body being stuck in a time due to what’s happened to him, but it was grating throughout.
Why you should buy this: Khaw’s delivered a really engrossing novella, one that has some fantastic creature moments and is filled with darkness and brutality. I really had a fun time with this one.
I’ll admit that the cover is the reason I picked this up. But I’m so glad I did. This eldritch horror noir just hit quite a few of my favorite elements in books. I liked the unlikeable characters, the writing was poetic but not too flowery, there was body horror, and it’s a novella! I don’t continue a ton of series, but I’ll definitely be checking out the next book!
I was really intrigued by the premise of this story. It started out fairly well and even maintained a good pace, but I just didn’t enjoy it much. I felt that important details of the makeup of these creatures and the environment weren’t fully explained, and I often found myself not following what was going on. This is a very short story, and went back several times to reread certain sections, assuming I overlooked certain things, but to no avail. The characters were interesting, most notably John Persons, but again, I just didn’t feel they were given enough time to ‘simmer,’ and he wasn’t written strong enough to make up for the lack of depth to everything else. I feel like if this was a much longer story, I would feel completely different. The writing style wasn’t bad, and again, I did enjoy the basic premise, but just wasn’t thrilled by the overall execution of it.
“If the thing is rage, I am a small blade in the correct place, the perfect time.”
Cassandra Khaw uses language as a small blade in the correct place. Closing the back cover of the book, I felt as if I’d glimpsed in its shadowed and narrow pages an enormous, burgeoning talent. A lurking entity of wordcraft and rhythmic expertise, smiling fangs against the thin veil of our understanding of genre and literature.
I seldom feel humbled by a book, but this one did the trick. Khaw’s craft pierces the upper echelon, standing easily and casually with the likes of T. E. Grau (another author whose works have humbled me) and Victor LaValle (who I consider the most woefully underrated author in contemporary fiction). Khaw’s literary flow is flawless. The ebb and flow of Khaw’s sentences left me slackjawed. Her language is a surgery, the inter- and intra-sentence flow the curve of a scalpel, her selection of words the ultrafine edge of a blade. It’s all in the correct place, the perfect time.
I can’t rant on enough about how much I loved the prose. And since prose quality is one of the major differentiations between the medium of literature and the medium of, well, most other media, that’s pretty damned significant.
Its flaws are few, but worth mentioning. The first flaw is perhaps a compliment: I wish it had been a novel. I loved the brush-away and handwaving against virtually all exposition, but part of what made such handwaving so breezy and easily understood is the assumption that the reader is familiar with the general genre and perhaps also with the works of Lovecraft (the Lovecraft references throughout aren’t necessary to understanding the tale, but the larger worldbuilding implications fill in a lot of blanks that are otherwise unaddressed). The character development, handled quite deftly at the current length, could also easily have been expanded. Most aspects of the book could have been expanded or further explored, actually, and I would’ve deeply enjoyed that. On the other hand, perhaps that would’ve been too satisfying…at its current length, it does leave the reader hungry for more. I’m figuratively chomping at the bit for the follow-up.
The second flaw is the downplay of suspense and tension. This is in part, I feel, a choice. It’s a pulp noir story, a character archetype temporally out of place, a tale of anachronism–and the plot devices, narrative weave, and general format adhere much more closely to the works of, say, Donald E. Westlake, Raymond Chandler, or, for the more modern reader, Charlie Huston, than to the works of horror authors. That is: it’s a pulp/noir novella first, an eerie supernatural novel second. The closest similar works are unlikely written by horror authors. The closest similar works may be Huston’s Joe Pitt series.
The point is: the narrator never seems under particular existential threat from his quarry. Quite on the other hand–the threat comes from being what he is, and from not knowing what kinds of machinations he’s caught up in. This reduces the tension of the Protagonist-Antagonist relationship, trading it in for the more hardboiled motif of a narrator caught in a web vaster and more complicated than he understands.
That is to say: the ‘flaws’ I found in the book weren’t really ‘flaws.’ Shortening something that could’ve been a novel into a novella is probably a better idea than expanding a novella into a novel. Choosing to stick to the hardboiled pulp genre more closely than H. P.’s supernatural cosmic horror is, well, a choice. And, given the noir grit covering every letter of the tale, obviously a strong one.
Needless to say, I fucking loved this book.
I could go on. I could mention the admirable ease with which Khaw fuses the aforementioned hardboiled noir with the aforementioned supernatural cosmic horror. I could mention the strict and charming adherence to character voice and characterization. I could cite the many gorgeous swaths of gritty prose printed on the pulp–er, page. I could do these things.
But it will be better if you find out for yourself.
Buy this.